How to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Grow Your Business Beyond the Owner Mindset

Business owners are overwhelmed. That’s no secret. Staffing shortages, inflation driving up costs, and general fatigue of meeting ever-changing government and health regulations is causing wear-and-tear on many industries. With conditions like these, replacing the energy you expend as a business owner feels nearly impossible. 

Small business owners are fiercely independent. They are keen problem solvers and brilliant inventors, often having invested decades tinkering with their products to get it “just right”. They care deeply about the quality and outcomes of their work and they will give nearly anything to ensure the business keeps growing. But there’s a problem: one thing small business owners do consistently is overestimate their capacity to fix every problem. 

Business owners have learned to be self-sufficient. When work needs to get done, they put their nose to the grindstone and don’t bother looking up! This means missed opportunities to delegate and involve other team members to share the burden. Small business owners (and their tireless work ethic) are their own worst enemy! You’ve heard the old saying before: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

How to Grow Your Business Online

The need to innovate in the present economy is profound. Americans are slower to return to jobs they once held post-pandemic, and it’s showing in the effects of a national labor shortage. This presents an opportunity to get creative. If staffing is your frustration and you can’t find the right person for front-of-house tasks, maybe it's time to adjust your business model slightly. Instead of meeting the demand for more in-person services, have you prioritized eCommerce? Could customer fulfillment be outsourced with a third-party delivery service? How about reskilling existing staff to move toward areas of the business that are the most valuable? 

Staying in businesses is about making these endless adjustments. One of the key advantages of being a small business is being agile. A small business can move, pick up, and shift, with success while larger franchises struggle to organize their many moving parts. So even if you are small, being flexible is a huge advantage. You can retrain employees faster because you have more oversight and you can adjust the business model with less interference from multiple departments or teams.

What is Scaling in Business?

When you’re looking to take your business to the next level, it’s important to remember that there’s a difference between scaling and growing. With help from Harvard Business Review, here’s the difference of what it means to grow your business: “Growth means adding revenue at the same pace you are adding resources; scaling means adding revenue at a much greater rate than cost.” So then, growth is about gaining ground in all areas of the business, while scaling is about optimization of profit. There are countless ways to think about growing your business: employees, revenue, market share—but scaling requires a strategy to slim down in some areas while expanding revenue in another.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel to Scale

There are a couple of ways a company can increase the odds of success with its scaling efforts. The first is to standardize processes. While the intrepid “go-it-alone” entrepreneur might cringe at this suggestion, it will save the company money and time by not reinventing processes that work well. As you train several employees over the course of time, different ways emerge for doing the same thing, and it’s important to have the organization and its workflows on the same page. This could cover technology, the way customer interactions are handled, or it could cover the specifics of how products are being made. Standardization is an especially important practice if you are a franchise owner. With fewer distractions, the business can clear the path forward to even higher levels of productivity and success.

A Few More Basics to Scale Your Business

Knowing your core competencies as a business is another scaling strategy. Scaling is the balance of knowing what you sell best and how you can sell more of it to customers. Products or services that meet these criteria are most likely to scale: is it teachable, is it repeatable, and is it valuable? Another question to ask is related to demand: How quickly could your business accommodate a triple or quadrupling in orders? What process and teams should be in place to achieve this without a significant investment of revenue? Is there a technology opportunity to help lift some of the burdens of manual tasks or eliminate wasted efforts of valuable team members? 

Each represents a potential scaling initiative. Being competitive isn’t always about selling the most products, it’s also about innovating and streamlining in ways that your competitors aren’t. The specifics are different for every industry, but the big idea is the same. Stay future-focused and learn strategies of greater efficiency and less redundancy.

Take the Struggle Out of Owning a Small Business

While business owners are chronically overcommitted, dealing with customer service issues, broken equipment, delivering goods to locations, and sometimes even filling in for employees— data shows that there is a cost to this mindset. 

When a business owner knows each customer by name, the value of that business’s future multiple drops. This is partly related to the size of the company because smaller operations tend to make less. However, if a business owner doesn’t know any of their customers individually and rarely gets involved in daily operational aspects, the business’s multiple increases above average. 

This shows how scaling can influence not only how a company is doing presently, but how much a company can make if it is focused on growing its future stream of profits. Part of this means paring down the owner’s involvement in every aspect of the business so they can focus on where the business is headed directionally. This is a huge difference from where most small business owners start out, but it is achievable. Learning to scale is multifaceted, but it promises a few ways to pull ahead of the competition at the right moment.

To learn more about our tried and tested scaling process, reach out to our team here. We look forward to helping your business thrive!