For entrepreneurs, business growth is always exciting. Perhaps you’ve experienced success, your company is thriving, and you feel ready. But growth comes with growing pains and challenges, too. If you’re not prepared, and you don’t have a detailed plan or vision for building your business, unwieldy growth can prove disastrous.
Strategically scaling your growth involves many factors, but learning how and when to scale your business can help ease growing pains and enable a seamless transition into a thriving future. Whether you run a family-owned business, a small startup, or a large corporation, scaling your business is possible, but it requires intentional steps.
What does it mean to ‘scale your business’?
If you’re experiencing business stagnancy and feel stuck, if your vision for growth doesn’t align with your current reality, it may seem like any type of growth will equal success.
Many business leaders go through the same frustrations, but with the right steps, scalable growth is possible. Nevertheless, the right components aren’t in place, you may not be able to deliver the results your clients or customers need.
Scaling your business helps to ensure that you can sustain development and increase your operations along with your profits and revenue. To scale your business means you don’t have to take on new overhead costs or break your operational budget in order to experience growth.
Scalability means:
- Ensuring you have the staff in place to support growth
- Developing the ability to meet market demand before taking on more business
- The ability to maintain consistent profit margins during periods of explosive growth
- Increasing revenue without increasing costs
- Increasing the supply of your product or service to directly parallel growth
- Expanding your resources to allow for successful growth
What’s the difference between business growth and scaling?
Although business growth and scaling are often mentioned in unison, they aren’t synonymous. Growth can occur based on your company’s ability to offer products and services that address the pain points of your customers and fulfill their needs.
Scalability refers to a business’s ability to support seamless growth and ensure that resources and services aren’t stretched to a breaking point, and that demand can be met. Scalable business growth increases volume of products or services without sacrificing efficiency or quality, and sets a business up for long-term success.
Examples of scalable businesses
So what does a scalable business model look like? How can entrepreneurs accurately predict growth and support a smooth, thriving transition into expansion? Here are some real-life examples of companies that have implemented quick, successful scalability growth strategies and significantly increased revenue:
- Amazon:
Amazon quickly grew from a startup online bookstore based in Jeff Bezos’ garage to the giant success story we all know today. The company continues to scale for growth by opening new facilities in strategic locations and hiring a large amount of staff to ensure supply meets demand.
Amazon uses a customer-centric approach which allows the corporation to correctly predict what resources are needed to sustain successful growth.
- Cisco:
The tech giant Cisco also offers a great model for how to scale your business. Especially known for its networking software and hardware products, Cisco has sustained successful growth since the company’s inception in 1984 — the dawn of the accessible computer age.
By keeping up with developments in technology and predicting where resources should be allocated in the future, Cisco continues to adapt to market challenges and experiences scalable growth every year.
- Facebook/ Meta:
From its initial launch over 20 years ago as a universal platform for Harvard students to the mega social media platform it is now, Facebook (Meta) wasn’t without its growing pains. However, the platform now boasts over 3 billion active users and is considered a top example of sustained scalability.
By hiring the best media and technology minds, and cultivating a growth mindset in its organizational culture, Facebook has been able to adapt to market changes and remain on top of the social media industry.
- FTD:
One of the only nationally known flower companies, FTD is only several years removed from a bankruptcy filing. The business has certainly known its share of failure.
Nevertheless, the floral gifting giant emerged from the ashes. Visionary, growth-minded leadership corrected a swiftly destructive course by partnering with companies like Baked by Melissa and Milkbar to meet evolving customer needs and scale business for successful growth and increased revenue.
- Netflix:
It’s hard to believe that in the early years of widespread public Internet use, Netflix was a direct mail DVD service. After entering the content streaming market in 2007, Netflix implemented scalability to become the top platform available for streaming movies and TV shows.
Netflix leadership strategically planned for growth in content delivery, membership, and backend services that allowed exponential success to occur without insurmountable obstacles.
5 Tips to successfully scale your business
How to scale your business may sound like a challenge, but if you implement specific steps, you may find the process is relatively simple. Entrepreneurs in every industry understand the importance of a growth mindset and forward-thinking leadership to successfully grow businesses — scaling is just one component of that foundation.
Here are some tips that can help you set your business up for scalability.
Create a strategic growth plan
Seamless scalability requires great timing. Develop an understanding of the growth cycle in your industry, and then implement a detailed plan that includes procedures, systems, and employee training that will build a foundation for scaling your business.
Reflect on your mission, vision, and values and revise them if necessary. Brainstorm on effective ways to continue to uphold these business totems moving forward. Develop a plan to increase customer retention. Establish a breakdown of company culture within your plan and implement ways to grow this culture.
Develop the right scalability tools
Brainstorm with your leadership team on the right tools to develop for your future growth. Study market trends and analytics. This may involve comprehensive digital marketing and social media strategies, email campaigns, customer journey mapping, and more.
When you have the right tools in place, you may be ready to take your business through a rapid growth stage and scale it to ensure a smooth transition to 7-figure revenues.
Evaluate your business to ensure scaling is possible
At times, slow and steady wins the race. If you’re operating on a tight budget or don’t have the resources to dedicate to scaling your business, it may be wise to refrain from making any huge leaps toward expansion until you have more room to do so.
Look at aspects of your business like customer loyalty, workforce size, and employee retention to make an informed decision about how to scale your business.
Cultivate a customer-centric focus
If you don’t already have customer-centric tools in place, it’s important to cultivate that focus before scaling your business. Create systems and procedures that allow for customer feedback, customer journey mapping, loyalty discount programs, and more to satisfactorily address the pain points of your target customers or clients.
Focus on hiring people with great communication skills and the ability to empathetically engage in every level of your workforce. Great customer loyalty ensures that there’s a demand for your products or services, and will grow with your business.
Train your workforce
The workforce is one of the greatest tools at an entrepreneur’s disposal. Employee retention and enthusiasm can go a long way in your approach to scalability — training and development is a vital contributor to a thriving, retained workforce. Building leadership skills in early career professionals can also help you to develop your company’s leaders of the future.
A recent survey from Lorman found that only 29% of employees are satisfied with their current inhouse advancement opportunities, and 74% feel they aren’t living up to their full professional potential due to a lack of training and development at work.
A growth mindset is contagious. If you give your employees opportunities to train and grow within your company, they will feel valued and more apt to productively strive to make your scalability plans happen.
Rapid growth without scalability measures can lead to disaster. However, by following the tips listed above, you may find that scalability is an exciting and simple, if not easy, process.
Ryan Niddel is the CEO of MIT45, serves on the board of multiple 7-figure (and beyond), successful companies, and is considered Ohio’s top growth specialist. If you’re ready to unlock your full potential, take your business to the next level, experience exponential revenue growth, and utilize breakthrough thinking to transform your company, connect with Ryan today to schedule a free consultation.
