Scaling a Business: 12 Effective Strategies for Next-Level Success

The two most popular words in business are growth and scaling. There’s a big difference between the two.

Growth means you get more revenue because you increase your resources. You hired more employees, and have more capacity to handle new customers.

Scaling a business means you can sell more and handle more business without having to add the resources to match.

With growth, you can have a 20% increase in revenue. That looks amazing on paper until you realize your operations expenses went up by 35%. That wipes out your entire profit.

About 92% of businesses aren’t successful in scaling. They can grow, but scaling a business requires a different mindset, tools, and strategies.

If you want to know what it takes to successfully scale a business, keep reading. These are the best strategies to use. 

1. Business Vision and Purpose

A business that has a strong vision and sense of purpose stand a great chance to succeed. It’s enough to get employees on board and more engaged.

Customers like to buy from companies that share their values. If you can communicate what you stand for, you’ll earn the trust of your customers.

The reason why this is important is that turnover is a business killer. If you constantly have to replace customers and employees, you can’t grow, let alone scale.

Look at your business model as well. You might have a business model that doesn’t allow for scaling. For instance, your business model might be a service-based business such as consulting or coaching.

You have the capacity to do so much, so it makes scaling a business difficult. You can add on more coaches to handle the load, but that’s growth, not scaling.

A subscription or product-based business model is good for scaling. You create products on the front-end and sell them in large quantities.

2. Establish Operations for Scaling

The secret to scaling a business is having good systems. That’s how franchise businesses are able to deliver the same product and services across thousands of locations.

If you want to scale a business, you need to create systems that let you scale operations. Closely examine all of your business processes.

Where are the opportunities to be more efficient? How can you improve employee performance?

Ask yourself how much work an employee can handle. Then ask how they can double their capacity. It forces you to develop creative ideas to improve systems for scaling.

3. Hire a Strong Team

It takes a team of committed employees to scale a business successfully. You can’t do everything yourself.

It takes your employees, suppliers, contractors, vendors, and managers to pull together. Hire people that are talented and understand the difference between growth and scaling.

You don’t want to have a team of people with a growth mindset. They’ll focus too much on revenue and not on the other aspects of your business.

4. Invest in Automation

Roughly 63% of small businesses used automation to survive the pandemic. Almost 9 out of 10 businesses say that automation helps them compete with larger companies.

Think about what your day would look like if you didn’t have to do the same tasks over and over. You’re freed up to work on big picture items.

That’s what automation can do for your business. You can use automation in every aspect of your business.

Automated chatbots interact with customers. The customer service team works on more complicated service issues, and all customers end up satisfied.

Data entry gets automated, reducing errors and operations costs.

Look at areas of your business that take up the most amount of time. This is where bottlenecks are likely to occur. Look for ways to automate those areas.

5. Delegate and Outsource

A CEO manages a team and oversees the larger strategy of a business. If you’re stuck doing data entry all day, how are you going to guide the business?

You can’t do it. That’s why you need to delegate tasks. Make a list of things that take up the most time and generate the least amount of revenue.

Those are things to delegate first. You can outsource to contractors and other service providers if you don’t want to have employees do those tasks.

6. Leverage Capital

A tried and true method for growing a business is using other people’s money. You can use outside investment for scaling a business, too.

Look for economic grants and incentives that assist small businesses. You can use these funds for implementing systems and technologies.

More capital lets you do more, but you have to be careful you don’t enter growth mode. Invest in the right technologies that are compatible with scaling, such as hosted private cloud services.

7. Build an Unshakable Brand

The brand is one of the most important assets of your business. It’s what brings employees and customers together. It’s how you communicate the essence of your company.

Your brand is how you make people feel.

Building a strong brand lets you scale up because more people identify with your company. They resonate with the vision, purpose, and values of the company.

They also love the customer experience. A strong brand attracts new people to your business without spending a lot on marketing.

8. Create a Product Line People Need

Do you have great products and services or are they mediocre? You’ll need to have a great product if you want to scale your business.

People want to feel good about the products they buy. If you have something that they need, they’ll feel better.

The best companies create products that people don’t know that they need. You don’t need to have a soda, but it makes you feel happy.

Approach product development with that mindset. You’ll have products that make it easy to scale your business.

9. Validate Ideas Before Implementation

A manager comes up with an idea. It seems like an amazing idea to the executive team, so they decide to implement the idea across the board.

That costs time and resources to do. It turns out, the idea isn’t that great. You just wasted a lot of time on an experiment.

There’s a balance between innovation and implementation. Definitely encourage new ideas and try them. The main thing to do is test them before you roll them out to the entire organization.

10. Play Chess Not Checkers

Checkers is a great game, but it’s based on chance. It’s a reactive game. This is the type of thinking that most small business owners have.

Chess requires a different mindset. You have to think through every possibility before you move one piece.

You need long-term vision and anticipation skills. Those are the skills you need to successfully run and scale a business.

11. Track the Right KPIs

Small business experts have a list of KPIs that you have to track. You need to measure website traffic, conversions, engagement, and followers.

These are useful metrics and they each serve a purpose.

However, these metrics might not have anything to do with your business. You can track social media followers all you want, but if your goal is to increase the number of leads and sales appointments, you have no idea if you’re reaching your goals.

Set goals for your business. You can set large, overreaching goals to measure the health of your business. Then give smaller goals to individuals and departments.

Choose metrics that allow you to measure your goals. Use that data to make key decisions in your business.

12. Always Seek to Improve Processes

Scaling a business requires a lot of planning and effort. Once you learn how to scale a business, it’s easy to sit back and relax.

That’s the worst thing to do. Scaling a business isn’t a static thing that you just do one time. You have to regularly assess and adjust your processes.

Don’t wait until your sales drop or your operations expenses balloon. Make quarterly assessments to see how your business is doing.

Consider economic and competitive changes and how they impact your business. That puts your business in the best position to pivot while continuing to scale.

Scaling a Business With These Strategies

There’s a huge difference between growth and scaling. Growth means you’re adding more revenue with the resources to match.

Scaling a business means you’re doing a lot more with less. This is optimal if you want to build a sustainable business. If you want to scale a business, start with your business model and vision.

Use the other tips to scale a business in this article. You’ll have a better business model and improved employee performance.

The end result is you can grow revenue without adding more resources. That’s a good sign of a healthy business.

For more business trends and advice, check out the Business section of this site.