Upscaling your business to the next level takes meticulous planning and preparation. While this move does mark progress, it also brings with it a new set of challenges including having to hire more people to fill in the workload, finding more investments to fuel day-to-day operations, and allocating resources without any disruptions. Here are five tips for effectively upscaling your enterprise:
Start Delegating
Your business is your brainchild; it’s the culmination of the time, sweat, and tears that you’ve spent trying to make it happen. As such, it’s understandable why so many entrepreneurs find it incredibly difficult to delegate the work to other people who they barely know. It does seem frightening to entrust a critical piece of your business to other people, but it is necessary if you want to move up the ladder. Delegating effectively can give you more time to devote to other more critical components, such as exploring new marketing channels, developing new product lines, and managing your relationship with existing customers. Whether you delegate in-house or outsource to freelancers and contractors overseas, proper task distribution is essential to sustainable upscaling.
Look For New Ways to Advertise
In order to reach the feats of companies, like Google and Amazon, you’ll need to get word out to a large group of people. Hundreds of people knowing about your brand won’t cut it. You’ll need to put your product or service in front of millions of people. This can be done by exhausting all your options, from handing out business cards and flyers to posting on social media and attending trade shows. Getting celebrities on board is another way to build and market your brand, but it does cost money. Each marketing campaign will cost you some amount of money, so it’s best to figure out what kind of campaign can best reach your intended audience.
Realign Short-Term Actions and Long-Term Goals
Perspective is often lost amidst the hectic work day, with projects or campaigns taking up most of your time. And while these tasks have definite merit, it is important to take a step back and realign your day-to-day operations with the initial objectives you set out to do. Without a clear big picture view, it is difficult to assess whether or not your business is moving forward and where next to pivot it to. To genuinely embrace the prospect of scalability, you must be able to see beyond the trees.
Get Funded
Sadly, without cash, your intentions and plans of scaling up is moot. Before you can begin scaling up, do the math to see whether or not you have the finances to take on the additional costs. Nowadays, there are a handful of new funding options you can apply for beyond the traditional bank loans. Launching crowdfunding campaigns, for instance, is one option that has the advantage of integrating well with your existing customer base. In exchange for investments, you can reward your investors with limited edition items, premium upgrades, or even company shares. Other new ways to get funded include peer-to-peer lending and debt financing, which is ideal for businesses who are looking for a large influx of capital but prefer not to give away equity.
Automate Tasks
Aside from delegating the bulk of the legwork to other people, you should also be exploring task automation with cutting-edge technologies and enterprise level applications. Set up your data in a cloud storage platform; automate employee training and hiring processes; set up payroll for fast, uninterrupted processing. Last but not least, have a website that makes it easy for your business to offer data to the public, whether it’s product details or changes in management.
Final Thoughts
Scaling is all about seeing what the next best step for your company is. And to be able to achieve these monumental shifts, you’ll need the right systems, processes, and talent working together behind the scenes.
