How to Make Your Small Business More Scalable

In the old times, when new companies brought something new to serve its customers, it captured almost 75% of the market share. This also gave the company the ability to sustain in the market for an extended period of time. In the modern world of business, where a huge number of Startups emerge every other day, sustainability is a prominent concern every business faces. It is easy to penetrate into the market but hard to sustain your business and make it further scalable.

To make your business more scalable, you should have a distinctive mindset and skills. You should be flexible enough to acquire new skills, master new concepts and strategize your business. Here is a step by step guide on how to make your small business more scalable:

Skill availability

Find out whether you have the appropriate skills your business demands. It is the skills that can take the firm to impressive results. A Skills audit is an efficient way to understand the gaps you have in your company to fill them, with either training of existing employees, or hiring new ones. If you do not excel in this, it is hard to make your business more scalable because you won’t have competent staff to run your operations. A company cannot expand only by requiring your 24-hour presence, nor can you rely on only a handful of skills as you grow your business. You ought to have the business idea and its innovation strategy in mind since it is you who is going to equip the related skills in your employees.

Calculate your operating cost

It isn’t necessary that more sales only can fetch you higher profits. You have to realise that high operating costs can make your business suffer losses. Thus, it is imperative to keep a check on your operating expenses at each level of sales. Make the required conclusions only after finding out if the operating cost is increasing, decreasing or remains the same.

Automation

Trying to grow your business by increasing the staff and labour cannot make your business scalable. You must consider whether you’ll be able to automate the operations as the sales progress. Every operation of the firm requires efficient performance and trained staff can’t assure this manually every time. Hence automation is definitely required. Automation allows you to avoid losing your control over operations in any of the circumstances. Automation can be seamlessly introduced in your business by creating documents and tutorial books that can help your staff get adapted to the automation process quickly.

Outsourcing

Usually, a start-up plans to keep all its business functions in-house. You as the owner may not prefer investing in outsourcing the operations. Your rationale behind this is you want to keep the entire control of your business transactions with yourselves. However, for scaling up your business, it becomes imperative to outsource certain business operations and create a leverage between in-house operations and outsourcing. Taking a risk to get better and specialised services is necessary for scaling up your business.

Choose the right market

It is imperative to choose the right market in order to scale up your business. There is a huge difference between pursuing your hobby and establishing a business. While doing business, you will have to move to a market where there is a huge demand for the respective services. Market choice has an enormous impact on the demand for your products and services. The right choice will help you scale your business and take it to exceptional heights.

Keep exploring

Merely designing a business plan and executing it does not help you scale your business. It simply helps you establish one. However, exploring new opportunities and innovating your services and products will definitely help you scale up. A good grasp of new opportunities and taking the first mover advantage is one of the biggest factors to ensure scalability in your business.

Create separate departments

Small businesses usually do not have separate departments for each function. However, in order to scale up your small business, it is paramount that you create departments for each function and create proper integration among departments for the smooth working of your organisation. Division of work and great collaboration between departments is imperative if you have any plans to scale up your business. Creating separate departments is like creating specific units that can individually as well as collectively focus on scaling up the business.

Proper financial planning

Scaling up of business requires more personnel, machinery, and improved operations. Moreover, better investment of funds is also required for the proper growth of any business. A proper financial planning at this stage is crucial as you have to decide on a lot of financial factors such as raising of funds, investment of the funds to earn maximum returns, and further strategic thinking towards finance.

Implement modern marketing

Marketing has transformed tremendously in the last couple of years, and its scope has improved to a broad extent when it comes to scaling up the business. The above fact holds same for both – Startups and Established businesses. A company that fails to market itself will fail to survive in the society, let alone scale-up. In the modern era, where there is a vast scope of online marketing, you must adapt to the modern marketing methods in order to ensure your sustainability in the market for longer times. Improved and advanced marketing process only will boost up the scalability of your business.

Revenue recurring

Suppose the customer has purchased the product or service you offered. Will he come back again? If yes, why? If no, why? The answer to these questions will help you interpret whether your small business is scalable or not. Returning customers fetch you an opportunity to earn more. You must have numerous options to build new customers as well as retain them as there is an enormous scope of business scalability on returning customers.

Partnership

This is one of the easiest and the best ways to scale up your business. In partnership, however, you tend to hold lesser percentage of ownership compared to what you previously did. The partnership not just combines two business firms and people, but it combines two different skill sets that can further perform exceptionally well on collaboration. The partnership allows you to share your skills, intelligence, knowledge as well as burden and workload.

Bottom Line

These are some of the factors worth considering when it comes to scaling up of business. However small a business may be, there are a number of ideas that can take that business to greater heights. All you need to do foremost is to conduct a precise, wise and timely planning. You can earn more profits only when you takes significant risks. The same rule applies here. It is only when you take calculated risks and efforts, you will be successful in creating a huge business!