Depending on how you started, scaling your business may have a different meaning to you than others either in your industry or others. If you started self employed scaling may mean hiring your first employee, while an entrepreneur may think of scaling as opening more locations, expanding markets, or even franchising. Either way, you’ll need to review your business model to make sure your ready for that next step.
Review your processes
Go through and make notes of what steps you take to complete a job, everything from how you contacted your client, how you created a quote, scheduled the job, did the work, and finally collect payment.
Now that you have your list, go through and see if it’s scalable. For this to be true, you should be able to provide a guide of sort to an employee that they can follow to successfully duplicate what you have done. Think of it this way, you go to a juice shop and order a juice you’ve purchased before but it tastes nothing like it did the first time you tried it. Regardless of who is behind the counter making your order, you expect the juice to taste the same. In order to accomplish this the staff was given a recipe of what to put in the juice and in what quantities. So they follow that process for making your order. The same goes for any business. Your staff needs to know what steps and in what order to follow them to complete a task so your customers are happy with the end result.
Incorporate the advantages of scale.
Some of the processes from that list can be changed to take advantage of the opportunities provided by scale. For example, one restaurant requires you to prep and make everything in that one location since that’s all the space you are working with. However when growing to multiple locations, you can have a facility where you marinade and prep your food and send it to all your restaurants ready to cook. This allow you to keep smaller kitchens on site allocating more space for your dining room. And of course more tables means a higher turnover. Further, by doing all the marinating in a single location you can more easily ensure product consistency. The same goes for the service industry, as you make your plan to scale, you might find it’s better to have one person per task. One person doing all the quotes or estimates while another does the labor and another handles invoicing will provide you better results than having to teach each employee to complete every aspect of the job.
Scale your business only when you are ready.
As with anything, you’ll always do better when there is a plan. Go through the steps above and make a plan on how you will scale your business. Once the plan is done, consider what you need to implement it. If you don’t have all the resources to do so, then make a plan to get you there first and then implement. Implementing your scaling process before you are ready can be a disaster. You might go from running a successful business to a failing one, or just add unnecessary stress to your life and burn yourself out. It’s easy to get excited over an idea, but a good business person understands the importance of having a good plan and sticking to it. Even if you have to wait a bit longer to do so.