Scaling your business
Scaling any business has 4 aspects, people, system, sales and market.
People: Do you have the right leaders in each of your departments? they may not be A+ candidates but should be someone who is earnest, capable, motivated and energetic. Finding good people is not easy, so hold on to them.
System: If your department/team fails when one person leaves the department/team, it means your business is not driven by system. There is limited process in place, you haven’t templatized all your regular & repeatable tasks, you don’t have a knowledge base, you don’t have software products executing the workflows, you don’t have a system of record, you don’t have a succession strategy. This is a big issue, unless this is fixed, business cannot be scaled. And if you need super heroes to run your business, it isn’t going to scale either, because there are not many super heroes out there.
Sales: Scaling by 10 to 25% is much different than trying to scale 2x or 3x your current size, you will need multi-pronged approach to this, from product/service mix, to Geo expansion, to hiring multiple sales people. High-touch sales is an hindrance to scale, see how you can move towards mid/low-touch sales, by moving parts of “attract” & “engage” to marketing and having sales spend more time on relationship and “convert”
Market: Will split the market into 2 categories (competition, market size). Know your competition well and differentiate yourself, so your prospect can see and remember you clearly (positioning). Scale needs large serviceable market, without which you won’t succeed, so either find one or change your product/service to align to a larger market size.
I believe if you can do well on these four aspects, your business will scale.
