Five Ways To Efficiently Scale-Up Your Business

Rewards and risks go hand in hand in business. And to reap the rewards, good growth strategies are a must. Without effective strategies, sustaining and scaling up a business is difficult. Business growth is critical to generate more revenue and profits, to increase market footprint and to compete with rivals. 
Growing a business and scaling a business are often used interchangeably. But even though the two terms share certain common features, these are essentially two different things, especially in today’s technology-driven world.
When a business grows, revenue increases but costs also rise at the same time. For instance, when an enterprise gains new customers, it may hire more employees to manage them or buy more raw materials to produce goods for the growing number of clients. This increases the enterprise’s revenue but also adds to the cost of the company, often in a similar proportion. This is where scaling is different than growth.

What Is Scaling In Business?

In simple terms, scaling means to increase the revenue quickly by investing minimum resources. So, scaling a business is not exactly the same as growing a business. For instance, the effort required in sending an email to one customer and an email with the same content to 100 customers would be the same.
Businesses that plan to increase sales, work and revenue without increasing the cost excessively must reflect on scale-up strategies.

How To Scale-Up A Business

Scalability depends on capacity and capability. So, for scaling a company pre-planning is important. Are you thinking of scaling your business?  Do you want to earn higher profits while minimizing expenses? Here are a few ways to effectively scale-up your business. 

Sharpen Your Focus:

Scaling a business requires proper time management. Businesses and companies must narrow down their goals and find practical ways to address those. 
When a person is scaling a business, many ill-conceived ideas and risk-prone proposals may cloud the mind. Business owners must focus on their mission and must muster the courage to say ‘No’ to bad and unrealistic ideas.
Scaling is highly dependent on customer-loyalty. So, one must align the products or services in accordance with the client’s preferences. It is equally important to get feedback from customers and work on the issues.

Manage Finances:

Businesses, irrespective of their size, must manage their finances well and even evaluate the options of raising external capital for expansion. Whether a business is hiring a new team or upgrading its technology, a ready financial support for every small and big change helps things far easier.
The scaling-up period in a business is a lag period when there is no profit. Scaling a business requires huge effort. In spite of the best efforts, things may go wrong. Hence, entrepreneurs must keep an eye on their financial condition and monitor cash flow at regular intervals. 

Collaborate With People Inside And Out:

With the business expanding, a strong team of employees driven by a common goal is a must for scaling successfully. Teamwork helps individual members to handle work more efficiently. If at any point there are doubts about expanding the manpower, outsourcing is a convenient business option.
Communication is a two-way process that helps to exchange ideas and make goals clear. So, business owners must communicate their vision to employees and simultaneously, encourage them to speak their thoughts and feelings. 
Founders and top management of a company must also build external relationships with customers, vendors, suppliers, banks and financial institutions, and sales partners.

Establish Strong Processes:

A business must hire the right people at the right time. For example, prior hiring of sales people much before a business is ready is absolutely a futile step and an unnecessary expenditure.  
Moreover, as business increases in size, building a hierarchical structure and assigning work becomes obligatory for effective operations. Delegating work at all levels is equally important, more so in founder-driven organisations.

Invest In Technology:

Digital transformation is important to accomplish business goals because it saves time and reduces cost. From artificial intelligence to simple cloud-based solutions, technology can help scale a business rapidly. Consider digital signature or electronic signature as an example. It saves paperwork and also quickens business approvals and deal-making processes. 

Conclusion

Scaling is the ability of the business to grow using minimal incremental resources. But scaling a business is easier said than done. Businesses are likely to experience difficulties at every step.
A major challenge for a business looking to scale up is adequate financial resources. There are several banks and non-banking financial institutions like IIFL Finance that can resolve this problem by providing a business loan. IIFL Finance, for instance, provides quick business loans through a fully online process to small and medium-sized enterprises for helping them expand their operations.