Tips to Scaling Your Business

One of the questions I frequently get from startup CEO’s and other leaders is simply “how do I scale my company?”  I don’t know if there is an exact science to successfully scaling your company, but I will offer some tips that I put a lot of weight on based on my experiences.

1. Do the little things to prepare the infrastructure for growth – This sounds like the most basic task, yet I have witnessed many companies that try to throttle their growth don’t have the foundation to support it, and the cracks in the foundation quickly become evident as they attempt to scale. 

2. Arrange the capital or prepare the budget – Scaling your business is going to require capital or an allocated budget.  Major purchases typically consist of software and systems to automate manual processes and procedures. In addition, as you scale you may be creating additional departments/divisions and will need to properly compensate the individuals in these new leadership roles.  

3. Recruit the necessary talent – In my experience this is often a very difficult task. The reason for this is you have to decide whether you reward loyalty and promote from within a valuable person who is not the most qualified for the role, or recruit a highly qualified individual from outside the organization and risk demotivating (and possibly losing) a valued employee.  Not to mention you also are at risk of disturbing what has probably been a great company culture thus far.  

4. Build Your brand – As I stated in a previous article, a brand is simply a promise of value derived from a client using your products/services. As you scale, you need to implement a campaign to bring awareness to your brand. Whether you are diversifying products/services, or expanding to a new region, this is a very important initiative.

5. Implement the “system” – These are the processes and procedures for each area of the business which need to be developed and documented.  This is often difficult because most people do not like to document how they spend their time.  However, this is critical as these processes and procedures need to be repeatable, and not dependent on a specialized person.  These are sometimes referred to as “cookie cutter”.  

6.  Focus, Focus, Focus – As you scale your business, it is important to try to not be all things to all people, and it is ok to say “no”. As I mentioned in our of my previous articles, I am a big fan of billionaire entrepreneur, Clay Mathile.  For background, Mr. Mathile’s, The Iams Company solely focused on dog and cat food nutrition.  As he began to scale his business, he had many offers to expand into other segments of the market such as equestrian, etc. which could have been quite lucrative.  He always responded to the offers with the same response – “what does this have to do with dog and cat food nutrition?”

If you are looking to scale your business and would like some assistance with the planning or execution, please reach out to me.