How to scale your business while retaining personalised services

When considering scaling a business, it’s important to apply strategies for growth that align with your original business vision while managing the impact of growth on your company.

Scaling your business will result in exponential revenue growth while dominating the industry your business lies in. Implementing the following basic steps can help form a sustainable scaling strategy you can rely on without neglecting your personalised services.

Five steps for scaling your business

Evaluate and plan; the right business model is most important
Take a good, hard look at your business and think about how you are structured for growth and strategise how you will achieve sales. Is your business plan relying on growth from organic sales, capture of increased market share, entering new markets or recurring revenue models?

Each of these different plans have unique characteristics when understanding how your business’ systems, infrastructure and team will be able to accommodate growth. The best planning starts with a detailed sales growth forecast, as it will assist you in identifying and developing strategies to accommodate the growth in income against increasing costs that drive that growth. The more specific you are, the more realistic your sales acquisition plan and marketing strategy can be.

It is also essential to forecast how your P&L statements will change, whilst anticipating where and how expenses will go up. This is particularly important because sales and marketing expenses will hit the bottom line before the ensuing income. The delta is a function of your growth strategy. This preparation allows you to maintain customers as your top priority while developing your business structure for expansion.
Optimise around the consumer
In the past, I’ve seen businesses make the mistake of optimising only to build revenue, rather than optimising around the customer. This mistake can create bad hand-offs and exposes consumers to the cracks in your organisation’s structure, especially in the early growth phase.

Business silos create gaps in the consumer experience that can be difficult to navigate, as well as challenging to resolve. Embedding an ethos of optimising for the customer, particularly in the scaling process, will compel a business culture that is inherently customer-centric and will allow for a positive impact on both the business and the customer experience. Neglecting the role that customer churn has in enabling a business to scale is financially measurable, as studies have shown that by increasing customer retention by 5%, you will boost your profits by 25-95%.

For example, at InteliCare, part of our go-to-market strategy to scale consumer reach in Western Australia included engaging a team of independent creative and media specialists to develop an initial burst B2C marketing campaign — but we also needed support infrastructure to evolve and grow, without simply throwing more staff into the cost-base. So by ensuring the right processes and subsequent support technology, such as CRM and CX systems and their workflows, your business can become integrated and improved beyond the manual, human-driven flows you use in startup phases.
Manage cashflow and finances for expansion
More than half of new businesses are prone to fail within the first five years of operation because they lack cashflow and working capital management, as well as the vision to grow. Regardless of how you are expanding your business, you are going to need additional capital to grow your business at a sustainable rate and maintain a high sales quota.

Ask yourself if you have a robust system in place to manage your sales orders as well as a billing system and receivables function to ensure invoices are collected in a timely fashion. Revenue leakage can easily occur without this focus as you move from 0-100 customers to 100-1000. Managing your cashflow and finances are critical, as by implementing strong cash management strategies, you will be able to forecast the timing of sales teams, marketing plans and new investment. If you don’t, you’ll compromise your customer service capabilities and your product quality.
Invest in technology to build systems that scale and drive efficiency
A challenge while scaling your business is that systems, processes and even your product itself can be difficult to scale. Systems that are sufficient in small organisations easily break down when the organisation serves an increasing number of customers and employees. If you invest wisely in technology, it will become easier, less expensive and less labour-intensive to scale your business as you can gain huge economies of scale and more throughput.

I recommend starting with smaller, niche software products designed for SMEs, which are often cloud-based and built for cross-integration, and will force you to examine your workflow, supply chain and product delivery process. You find the weak points by asking “Will this work at one-thousand times the volume?”, enabling you to get it right in the sandbox environment before making costly decisions to invest in something that is all-singing and all-dancing.

It’s just as important to allow your current systems to evolve over time and grow with your expanding business, as well as evaluating new products on the market that may save you money while accommodating much higher volumes in every aspect of your business.
Hire the right people and never overlook the importance of work culture
As you scale your business, you are likely to need more staff — which is why developing a support team that is flexible and can grow with the company is an important component of this.

It is also vital for business leaders to communicate business activity, progress and challenges with the wider team, especially when you’re going through periods of high and rapid growth. Many leaders fail to do so, resulting in uncertainty for the team and a poor work culture. Honest and open communication within the workforce will create the right culture and environment where people want to be and want to excel, leading to dramatic advantages for you and your employees as well as overall business success.

The critical elements in the hiring process are to examining candidates for adaptability as the number one element. You need a mix of backgrounds, including experience in large corporations so they know what “ideal” looks like, coupled also with time in startups. In all cases, their innate personality needs to be tested for resilience and their ability to work while scaling is underway. That means they should be excited — rather than frustrated — by environments that are ambiguous; be able to make decisions with imperfect information; be willing to change quickly; are experiment-oriented; and have inevitably experienced failure, but are capable of moving forward.

If you have built a strong team, you should have enough trust in them to delegate many important tasks so you can work “on” the business, rather than “in” it. To really learn how to scale your business, you must delegate tasks to those on your team and ask yourself, what are you doing that someone else could handle? Your business has to be able to run itself and thrive even when you are not there. Achieve this by addressing limiting mindsets such as “If I want something done right, I have to do it myself” and by establishing delegation habits that allow you to own your time and to stay focused on the big picture.

The biggest cultural trait you need to embed is that failure is okay and won’t be punished because it means you are trying, learning and pivoting.

Scalability is about capacity and capability; it requires planning and some funding, along with the right systems, staff, processes, technology and partners. Learning how to scale a business effectively while keeping your customers front-of-mind will mitigate risks such as instability, financial loss and aggressive competitors by ensuring foundational operations are created that will support growth in the long term.