You can’t be sure when it’s time to scale and expand your business until you’re fully confident.
Confidence starts with knowing the difference between scaling and expanding – and growing with the help of your culture and employees.
If you rush the process, you risk growing too fast. If you wait too long, you’ll lose potential revenue and profit.
Expansion is a reactionary mode and occurs as your company starts to accelerate. Your customers respond well to your marketing and customer service, and you need to hire just to keep up with the demand.
But hiring in a knee-jerk reaction always leads to problems such as settling for the wrong employees.
So, scaling is the best way to go. Scaling is all about planning and developing repeatable best practices – operating efficiently and creating systems to grow effectively and exponentially.
This means having proven systems for operations, sales and marketing.
Culture
But scaling must start with management of your people. They must be supportive of your vision, values and culture. Of course, they must be well-trained.
Therefore, you must have a healthy culture. It starts with you and the need to develop habits for a positive workplace culture.
Then you must use best practices in recruiting, hiring and investing in the best talent for your situation.
Once you’re confident in your staff, you must systemize everything – create turnkey operations – from finance and marketing to operations and sales.
You’ll know if you’re growing too fast if you’re increasing your workforce but you find you’re having to hire the wrong candidates just to fill positions.
Hiring the wrong people will not help you to scale effectively.
Personal and organization brand
Leaders know their personal brand. Because delegation is a fundamental driver of growth, they also know best practices in employee delegation.
They’re not trying to do everything themselves, especially the tasks in which they’re not proficient.
Self-awareness of your strengths and weaknesses is very important. Then, you’ll be in a better position to hire accordingly to fill in the gaps of your weaknesses.
That starts with hiring your employees. Expertise is important. As a leader, the CEO is not necessarily the smartest person in the room.
Your employees – your human capital – should become your No. 1 asset. For maximum profit, partner with your employees.
But develop a social media policy first. You and they should be on the same page regarding your brand image and the types of messages you need to communicate.
Continue to engage your employees and motivate them to offer profitable ideas. In marketing, ask them how they can and want to contribute to promote your brand values.
Empower your employees to become brand ambassadors, especially on social media. Celebrate their efforts and accomplishments.
Regarding your big-picture goals, remember your employees can help you in strategic planning.
Cost-cutting priorities
Cutting costs is vital. But operating efficiently with best-practices in management and marketing should be the top goals.
When it’s necessary to cut expenses, many companies focus on the wrong priorities when they’re too quick to implement layoffs and cut back marketing budgets.
Just as you differentiate your company to your customers, you must differentiate your costs to propel your business growth. Focus on best practices in strategically cutting costs.
Where to start?
For financial performance, the best way to achieve optimum efficiency is a management-performance audit, development of solutions and implementation of best-practices in management.
Key components of a management-performance audit include cost-cutting; focusing innovation in production and processes; and continuous improvement in management.
Time is money. Poor management wastes time.
Final thoughts – consequences
Without best practices in management, here are samples of consequences:
- Too much time spent solving preventable problems
- Too much time solving small problems that spiral out-of-control
- Too much time wasted trying to salvage wasted resources
- Your team’s morale suffers
- High turnover among top-performing employees
- Chaos leads to rising expenses and poor pricing
Again, your key to scaling success — best practices in management.
From the Coach’s Corner, you might consider relevant strategies:
Why Startup Companies Fail – How to Win — It’s vital to conduct a thorough needs-assessment of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – followed by development and implementation of a strategic action plan. Here’s more.
For Profits, Manage Your Growth at the Right Pace — Entrepreneurs frequently try to rush their business growth. Certainly, growth is great but if you scale too fast, you’re looking for trouble. The key is to prepare.
Finance Checklist for Strategic Planning, Growth — Strategic planning in finance for growth means avoiding trendy fads. Instead, it requires an ongoing down-to-earth approach in order to create value. Here are seven steps.
HR Pros Typically Rescue Managers Who Make 11 Errors — Beware: Many problems are not caused by HR professionals but by managers who don’t use best practices.
Management: How to Help Employees to Grow Professionally — Managers owe it to the organization to help their employees grow professionally and will benefit from higher employee performance and low turnover.
“Growth is the only evidence of life.”
-John Henry Newman
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