Have you ever wondered: what exactly do entrepreneurs mean when they say they want to invest in scalable businesses?
Scalability, in simple words, describes businesses that have the potential for growth and increased revenue without needing large investments.
For example, many software companies are scalable. The majority of the costs are incurred in the developing stages. However, once the product is finished it is relatively easy to make a second copy of the software: simply copy it.
You can contrast this with consultants. Every client needs one-on-one time with the consultant. Therefore, there is a limit to how much work the consultant can do, and therefore this is not a scalable business.
In order to scale your business, you’ll need to follow these steps.
Perfect your supplier contracts
When your business expands, you need to make sure your supplier contracts are as tight as possible. The best way to ensure this is to have the contracts on fixed annual rates.
This helps you to be able to forecast and plan for the upcoming year’s costs. And, with scalability, you’ll be able to get more revenue while not having to spend too much money.
Perfect your customer service
How are you communicating with your customers? Do you have a customer representative team in-house or do you outsource it?
If you have your customer service perfected at this point, that means it will be much easier to handle customer complaints when you’re busy expanding.
One of the worst things you can do is to have unsatisfied customers right at your growth stage. If your current customer service infrastructure can’t handle a lot more customers, you need to work on fixing it.
Perfect your product development process
Your product is never really complete, no matter how good it is. Your customers will consistently want more and your competitors will increasingly steal your ideas or come up with their own better ones.
Because of that, you need to look at how you can maximize your service and/or product potential in the market.
In order to do that, you need to start with your development team’s agilityFind the best. You should brainstorm ways you can increase your team’s efficiency and effectiveness now before the real growth and pressure happens.
Perfect your automation
One of the best ways to get into serious scalable mode is by deciding which parts of your business processes can be automated. This means you’ll need to look at the necessary but possibly mundane or arduous aspects and functions of your business.
Then you need to determine which parts can benefit from being automated–this could be a fully automated system, some software or tool, or even some tasks related to manufacturing or even HR.
The initial investment may be large, but you are investing in the long-run scalability here. If you want your business to grow quickly, you need to save money later by spending money now.
How to scale your business
Your scalability of course depends on how well you prepare now for your success later.
By following these simple steps, you’ll be much more prepared when the real growth kicks in.
