Building a business into a bustling enterprise can come with its fair share of challenges. From conquering a niche to taking over markets point-blank, there are a myriad of micro-milestones that entrepreneurs find they must reach in order to grow their modest company into a thriving monolith.
Growth-oriented business owners have likely done plenty of reading on the subject of innovating, upskilling, and other methods that promise an upwards trajectory. What you may not be as familiar with, is the value of an agile business. Those looking to attain commercial success can only benefit from investing in the flexible scalability of their enterprise.
But what is scalability exactly, and what role does it play when it comes to business development? We’ll be answering these questions today, alongside providing a few expert pointers on how you can nurture the scalability of your own enterprise.
Laying a strong foundation to help you build
The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that your organisation has a strong base upon which it can continue to grow upwards. This means investing in business insurance, ensuring that your business registration is always up-to-date, and that you’re working from a clearly defined mission statement. Yes, laying the foundations of a strong business isn’t exactly as thrilling or big-picture a task as it sounds. But rest assured, that this is a quintessential preliminary component to building an enterprise that will stand the test of time.
And truth be told, putting in these foundational hours provides far more benefits than just aiding your scalability. Doing this preliminary work and developing a clear-cut business map can also help you secure investors from the get-go. And as scalability is defined as your company’s capability to grow in size and scale with agility, the more diversified funding and capital at your disposal, the more likely it becomes that you can grow your business in accordance with your preferred development strategy.
Testing the adaptability of your daily operational processes
Speaking of building a strong foundation, it’s imperative that your company’s daily operational processes are kept similarly uniform and with plenty of space for amendment and improvement. The best strategy here is to make sure that your operational processes are just as efficient as they are simple to master. That way, you can basically make sure that newer staff can learn the ropes, you can reduce your company’s turnover rate, and best of all, ensure that there’s always ample time in your workday for investing time and resources into innovation and development.
With streamlined and linear daily operational processes, you’ll also find that introducing new products or services to your company’s customer offerings feels a lot easier. In other words, you won’t have to waste precious hours on administrative tasks when establishing new income streams. You can just set them up as you would your existing streams, and let the profits filter in with the aid of your focused workforce and efficient operational flow.
Business owners will find project management software and other digital technologies to be a super asset when looking to streamline their company’s daily operational processes. Similarly, investing in automation and other benefits provided by digital business management solutions, can help your enterprise gather plenty of data alongside completing operational processes. Though more on the value of data below!
Finetuning your sales funnel and customer journey
There’s a reason why scalability is measured in both agility as well as adaptability. Any business can adapt to a market environment or stimulus in due time, but it’s the agile enterprises that are most likely to capitalise off of an opportunity before its competitors. Simply put, when it comes to staying at the top of your market, acting first and with clear footing is key.
All successful businesses have invested in market research at some point or another. It pays to be aware of the expectations and buying habits of your target market, especially now in the digital age, where the wants and needs of your consumers are likely to be more changeable. Thankfully, being in the digital age presents just as many solutions as it does problems. For starters, market research is now more accessible for small business owners and startup enterprises than ever before.
You can glean market insights from industry reports collated by reputable research agencies, or even from your company’s own Google Analytics account. And for those looking to invest in digital marketing campaigns, keeping on track of the performance metrics of your campaigns with marketing software or even Google, Facebook or Instagram Ads, can also offer some valuable insights, spanning from the clickthrough rate of your ads and promotional posts, to the session times and efficacy of your campaign’s tailored landing pages.
And once you do have this data at your fingertips, all that’s left to do is adjust your marketing efforts as needed, tweaking your customer acquisition strategy until it’s in optimal nick. From here, all you need to do is maintain this killer sales funnel, turn your focus towards bolstering your customer retention processes, and once again, let your profits roll right in.
Investing in people alongside products and technology
Nobody achieves anything alone. Even the most successful innovators in history had people around them. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak, Marie Curie had her husband and partner Pierre, and the Apollo 11 astronauts had dozens of dedicated engineers and astrophysicists manning their workstations in Houston. Having a strong team behind you can bridge the gap between treading water and reaching for the stars.
On top of this, having a diverse team of professionals driving your organisation can actually help inspire innovation. Homogenous teams run the risk of everyone thinking the same way, whilst teams with many heads from a variety of different backgrounds, are more likely to see things with a new or dynamic perspective.
So invest in people on top of investing in new income streams or business technologies. Human innovation is the force that spearheads most of the globe’s influential enterprises, so it goes without saying that it could do the same for yours. In short, having a solid team that is ready to follow you into battle can help bolster your business’ scalability in more ways than one.
Global expansion: the ultimate in scaling your business
If your company is already starting to feel like a big fish in a little pond, then chances are global expansion is on the table. Expanding to international markets is arguably the final frontier for many business owners. And despite how lucrative an opportunity global expansion can be, it is undeniably a daunting undertaking with plenty of moving parts.
For starters, business owners can’t guarantee that there’s a need for their product in foreign markets. And if there is, that need may currently be being fulfilled by a trusted local company. So what edge can you equip your business with to help it take over?
Cultural sensitivities are another consideration that must be made when looking to expand globally. For example, the branding or advertising behind your products may need to be revisited to ensure that they align with the values of local consumers. And in strategising on this point, you may find that your product or service doesn’t actually translate all too well into some foreign markets than it does for others.
This leads us to our final point: investing in the scalability of your business also involves understanding the logical limits of its growth, or at least the growth of a particular section or product offering. Although there is a rhetoric in commerce that companies should operate under the assumption that they can grow exponentially, entrepreneurs that are truly growth-oriented will take a pragmatic approach to cultivating their scalability. This means listening to the team behind you, conducting market research, and investing in customer retention alongside customer acquisition.
