Some people start their business with the intention of keeping it small – but for others, being in business is all about building something that will be greater than them; in which case this blog is for you. Quite often scaling up your business is an evolution, as your business progresses so you build and develop it. But it still needs that revolutionary spark of change to get things going. So if you want to build something, how do you do it? What are the things that make a difference?
This is an area of advice where we are often called in to help. Scaling up, growing your business, growth hacking, call it what you will: this is something where we have helped lots of our clients to achieve more. Firstly however, sorry if you were hoping for a magic formula to apply to growing your business – there isn’t one! Scaling up your business relies on hard work, persistence and seizing opportunities. What we can do in this article is give you a start, so here are my 7-points to start the process of scaling up your business .
1 Viability
The first thing to do is give yourself a reality check: if you currently have a side hustle or micro business, then if you scale it up will it still work? Is the market big enough and the profits large enough? If you are planning your new business then this equally applies to you.
2 Cash
Scaling your business means investing in growth. This might mean additional people or equipment or property. What about more money to pay for more marketing? You get the point, you need money to grow and how much do you need and where does it come from? Step 1 is to prepare a business plan and cashflow forecast. Not only does this help you plan and clarify your ideas, it also identifies how much you need.
…funding is then a different question and one that sometimes means you need to grow more slowly that you want to.
3 Funding
Getting funding is often an important step in any growth plan. There are quite a few variations on the ways in which you can get money. What is important is to have a bit of a tour through the options and see what might be available to you. So talk to me or to a finance broker to checkout your options.
4 Are you serious?
Growing a business isn’t for the faint-hearted and often takes some tough decisions. Not all decisions are extreme ones and not every business owner is prepared to take hard decisions, let alone extreme ones. You do have to commit to making a difference and working hard to achieve it. The quicker you want to grow the more you have to be prepared to take risks.
5 Fundamentals
Before your business can grow, you have to have the fundamentals of business in place. For example it is no good getting twice as many sales leads if you don’t have the capacity to do the work to fulfil them. If you don’t have good systems and procedures, then getting them good needs to be part of growing and scaling your business.
6 Marketing
All business growth requires your marketing to scale up. As well as your business plan you need a marketing plan. Having a strategic plan and the marketing activities and building blocks to deliver it will help you to grow and scale your business. The holy grail of marketing is finding low cost, high value ways to get new customers …but obviously not everybody can do this.
How can JVCA help? By helping you to think strategically in developing a business plan, and then by linking you to other professionals who can help deliver those aspects of the plan you can’t do yourself; one of the points being that if you could do this by yourself, you probably would have already done so. So stop failing on your own and contact us now to get our help in succeeding!
