It can be difficult to know what to do first when you’re growing your business. You’ll have a great idea for a product or service, but you need more than that if you want to scale up your business. Becoming a scale-up business means setting yourself up for rapid business growth.
Getting this growth right needs thoughtful planning. It’s a good idea to decide what you’re doing before leaping in and making any changes.
At the very start of your scale up process, you want to sit down with your Board of Directors or senior employees to discuss the future of the business. You want to make sure you’re all on the same page, and that you make the most of the experience available to you.
Work through the 5 ideas suggested here and you’ll have a much firmer footing to launch your scale-up from.
Contents
1. What is your mission?
Source: capitalandgrowth.org
When you think about the future of your business, what do you see? What do you want it to have become?
Anyone could say they want to make more profits or see more growth. What makes a business leader great is being able to say what that actually means to them.
Your mission should be something that is achievable and measurable. Decide where you want your business to be and how long you think is reasonable to take, then assign an observable figure to that.
Maybe you want to double your value in the next 2 years. That’s a usable mission that you can build a strong strategic plan around.
Developing this business plan can be done using tools from your strategy toolkit, such as MOST Analysis. MOST takes you through 4 business planning steps. You start by defining your mission and work towards deciding on actionable tactics.
When you start from an actionable mission, your business strategy will be much stronger. Your aims will be realistic and achievable.
The aim of a strategy planning meeting is that everyone leaves knowing what they need to do to move the business forward. At the end, you want your business to have a checklist of actual tasks to work through that will help you grow.
2. Keep monitoring your business growth
The real world is full of surprises. No prediction you make will be completely accurate and, even if you’re right on almost everything, it’s the one you weren’t that can really catch you out.
Using the core ideas of your business strategy, you know what you want your business to do. You can’t assume, however, that that is what’s going to happen. Even the best made plans can go awry.
Successful businesses keep monitoring their strategies, and don’t make the mistake of being too confident. Strategic reviews are in many ways like having your planning meeting again. They show you how well your ideas are playing out, which allows you to be much more agile.
It’s a lot easier to stay on top of your strategy if you establish a system to measure success from the very start. If your strategies have monitoring criteria written into them, it’s much easier for you to see how well they’re doing.
Schedule in these review meetings so that your Board can go over the numbers and assess the success of your business plan so far. It’s easier to save your growth from disaster if you notice halfway through that something isn’t working, rather than waiting until the end to find out.
How often you should do these reviews depends on your business and the workflow of your strategies. Give yourself time for noticeable changes to have happened otherwise you’re just wasting time. On the other hand, make sure you have enough time to make meaningful changes after your meeting.
3. Keep up your research
Source: startupdonut.co.uk
When starting your business, you probably researched your market to help you find your place in it. This process doesn’t stop being useful once you’ve gained your foothold. This is a practice you should keep up throughout your business’s whole life.
A great business leader understands their place amongst the competition. You won’t always be the best option in your market. But if you have competitors who are doing better than you, you can use it to your advantage.
Why are they doing better? Understanding your difference will help you understand your business better.
If they’re getting more customers, how could you make yourself more attractive to consumers? If their clients are more loyal, what can you do to improve customer retention? If they’re making as many sales as you but also making more money, how are they profiting more from those sales?
Understanding your competition doesn’t mean you have to copy them to succeed. You can remain your own business, and you should. Understanding your differences will help you figure out what you could do to make yourself stand out and implement it as a strategy
You don’t need to be in direct competition. There may be ways you can win over a certain segment of the market rather than trying to focus on everyone. This will build you a stronger customer base that you can then expand out from.
4. Don’t forget your marketing strategy
You can’t sell to people who don’t know you exist. Your business needs a brand that people want to interact with. Your marketing strategy defines your public image and your efforts to expand it to as many people as you can.
You can do a lot of good work with some very simple concepts. Breaking down your business into a one sentence summary of what makes you worthy of your customer’s money is a great place to start.
Once you have this message figured out, you want to keep your marketing consistent. This statement is who you are and what you do. You can use it as a first stage marketing tool.
An important part of marketing is generating awareness as widely as possible. When people are thinking about a problem they’re having, you want them to know that you are an option. At this first step, all they need is your name and the most basic idea of what you do.
It’s not just about getting your name out there, though. You want a plan for every stage of the funnel including keeping those that have made a sale.
Once they know you exist, what information is easily available about your business? When they’re looking into options, you want to make sure you’re easy to find and clear to understand. It’s also important to make sure your sales and marketing departments align around this central message to ensure a smooth transition.
Remember that your marketing strategy is one of the most important parts of maintaining growth. You can launch new products, automate your production, restructure, but if you don’t have people to sell to, it doesn’t matter.
5. Never stop developing
Source: mindful.sodexo.com
Business growth never stops, and you can’t either. You may have developed a great 2 year business plan, got your tactics in motion, and established a solid system to review your success, but the work isn’t done.
You don’t want to be overbearing or overwork your team, but keep on top of their tactics. Often these changes will be in addition to the work your Directors are already doing to run your departments, so it’s easy for them to forget. Your strategy depends on them getting jobs done, and you can’t let things fall behind.
Down the road, you may find that your strategies aren’t working out as planned. This is why you have your strategic reviews. You want to know that this is happening so that you can respond. If something needs to change, be ready to swap it out and try something else.
It’s also important to stay on top of training and make sure you understand the ever changing market you’re in. You want to make sure that you and your senior team are always best equipped to lead the business to success.
Part of this is having to accept that sometimes massive changes will occur that aren’t within your means to control. Unforeseen crises could threaten your business or unexpected opportunities can open up that you’d not seen coming.
If you’re flexible and don’t hold too tightly to your plan if it’s no longer the best one in the aftermath, then you’ll be better equipped to grow your business.
To summarise
Successfully achieving business growth comes from putting the work in. Any great business got that way because its leaders have put in the time and attention it deserved the whole way through its development.
So long as you go on with a structured plan and an observable goal in mind, you’ll be giving yourself the best start you can. What made your business great to start can carry on through to make a great scale-up business. Make sure you always understand who you are and where you stand.
Remember to never become complacent . The business world is constantly shifting, and there’s always something new to learn. Stay on top of your business and keep giving your customers what they need, and you’ll keep growing.
Boardroom Advisors’ Scale-up Growth Diagnostic helps you understand where your business can improve its growth and what kind of support you can benefit from.
