As your business began to grow. Revenue is good. Everybody is working. An era of the end of worries is on the horizon now.
No. It’s not happening.
Scaling up your business intelligently and effectively is crucial to saving all your strengths and hard work you have put in building a business from scratch.
Scaling is the capacity of your business to keep on growing without being a burden on your costs. As you grow your system, your team, your organization, and product also won’t evolve own it’s on. Seems common sense. Still, we need a reminder to not sap the life out of running a business.
There are some healthy tips which can be really useful in this journey of a startup.
- Art of prioritization: As businesses grow, everything seems to be overwhelming. You can focus on all things in onetime and not all things are equally important. For example, things which are more urgent and have a direct impact on the product or the service you are providing.
- Put everything in a systematic manner: Three important areas to really focus on and need to put them in a process instead of a people-centered approach. First is hiring people. Hiring the right people for the right job is the key ingredient in scaling a business. People who don’t share the same values, interests, goals and even future orientation with your company regardless of their expertise in any area would prove to be a burden on your company in the long run.
Secondly, investment catering. You’ll need more investment if the growth rate is surpassing all the projections you have had from it in the beginning. Getting investment at this stage is not difficult but to manage them. You may need extra help here.
Thirdly, customer satisfaction. This is the core issue around which the whole efforts of your company based upon. All the tensions of managing people and growth-management would be worthless if your customer is not being kept satisfied with your product.
- Image factor: Keep an eye on your brand image in public on platforms like social media. A bad-word-of-mouth can trigger a PR crisis which is an additional burden to deal with. An angry customer is not professionally treated can be detrimental to your overall marketing strategy as well.
- Marketing acceleration is also required for keeping the audience engaged with your product and company. You need to adjust to your marketing requirements as you make progress and a quick update is always encouraging, especially through content marketing technique.
- Adapt to new power dynamics: Maybe when you set out on a path to start your company you were alone and with a minimum number of staff. So, power over company infrastructure and administrative issues was very central and was entirely in your control. But now, things would change as new people came in. you need to create space for other people along with some rationality with which they are assigned for certain tasks.
- Remember Vision: we began this series with a vision which is the core and future blueprint of your company. Every decision you would take would impact that envisioned future. As a leader of a company, you are going to be very influential on employees’ behavior. Eventually, even the very minute things you would do will have a significant amount of symbolic meaning. And that’s lead to the creation of company culture. Scaling can’t happen without controlling these factors.
- Judgment: Accountability is very basic to the effective functioning of the company. Without checks and balances a growing company would soon decimate. And this would impact even the product refinement. Moreover, you need to apply this to the recruiting principles as well.
- Art of deletion: Till now we have talked only about adding and managing things. But deleting things is also important as adding and maintain operations of the company. You need to perform this with care, and reason conditioned with not-losing-value. It also means if 25 people were reporting to you formerly but make it to 5 now.
Pitfalls to avoid:
- Forgetting about PMF: startups squeeze energy from you in this phase a lot. So, don’t forget about it administrative drudgeries.
- Avoiding problems: You may postpone problems for future, but procrastination is more harmful at this stage then it was in the former phase of developing it.
- Things would get easy: This is a delusional thought. Growth comes with hardships and more work and more responsibility.
- People are not on one page: Your whole crew needs to be with you. And different departments are to be on the same page with respect to agility, speed, evolution, and growth of the business.
Consider Questions:
- Which areas of the company needs my immediate attention?
- Should I contact previous investors or try to find new?
- Am I pacing the marketing at the appropriate speed?
- How much power should I transfer to lower management?
- Accountability of people and refinement of the product is happening or not?
The bottom line:
Whatever strategy you have in mind for taking this forward from here, and setting the process in momentum your focus should be on looking forward and orienting your whole team towards this mode of thinking.