The best ways to scale your business

If you want to make 2017 the best year yet for your business, there are a few things you’ll want to focus on in order to scale effectively (you’re going to need more than just marketing skills to scale up). Keep in mind that most of these suggestions will only work for growth stage businesses, as start-ups have different priorities in order to successfully scale during their first few years.

Here are the best ways to scale your business:

Hire the right people

No successful business can expect to scale up to 5 or 10 million revenue a year without building the right team. The problem? When the word “hiring” is mentioned, many business owners are left with a bad taste in their mouths thinking about the amount it will cost in annual salaries, or the office politics and petty squabbles that could occur.

At times it can be difficult to have a large team, but this difficulty is also often where you can expect to make the most money. If you’re one of those people who feels that either no one can do the job as well as you can, or you simply always end up with bad teams, the problem probably isn’t your employees – it’s your leadership skills. If this all gets a bit too much for you, you may want to get Cezanne HR software. This will help you stay on top of all your HR worries and ensure your HR department

Use the right processes and systems

Two of the main reasons why business owners and entrepreneurs have a tough time managing people is either due to a lack of skills or a lack of systems. Once you’ve hired enough talent for a solid team, it’s your job to ensure that they’ve got all the tools needed to get the job done. An example of a great tool to utilize is enterprise architecture software to help you to build an abstract representation of a business’s IT assets as a blueprint for organization and success. 

You can’t expect someone to be a great employee if all of the information they need to do their job is locked away in your head, so you need a good system that will allow you to communicate your goals, priorities, and ideas. And without processes in place to facilitate workflow, you’re basically turning on the tap before you ensure that the water is connected.

You will also want to carry out a considerable amount of research before anything. You can look for market research from circle. This can greatly help you when it comes to scaling your business.

Anchor – market research from circle

In order to set your business up for success, you need to create systems that convey ideas, and develop the kinds of processes that will make those ideas a reality.

Retain your customers

Often business owners get so caught up in attracting new customers, that they forget how much more cost-effective it is to focus on keeping the customers they already have. If your plan is to scale, you need to include an investment in customer retention – otherwise you’ll be leaving money on the table.

This means regularly checking in with customers to make sure they’re happy, and having systems in place so you can easily fix any problems that may cause customers to move to your competitors.

Sort out funding

The fact is, it takes money to make money. And business owners that take too long to investigate funding options are missing out on valuable time that could be focused on all of the above. If this sounds like you, it’d be worth looking into OakNorth Bank, specialist lenders who are focused on providing debt finance up to £20m.