SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
OWN YOUR MARKET SPACE
Table Of Contents 01
EVALUATE AND PLAN
02
GET THE FUND
03
ACTUALIZE THE SALES
04
DEPLOY TECHNOLOGY
05
STAFF OR OUTSOURCE
06
DOMINATING YOUR MARKET SPACE
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
INTRODUCTION Most people think of business and start thinking about selling. Yes, a business wants to sell to generate enough revenue to ensure pro tability, and hence, the sustainability of the business. But the sustainability of a business transcends way beyond just merely selling. Yes, you may be selling extensively and gaining lots of customers, but there is a problem that you would soon be faced with; dealing with delivering the needs of all these new customers. This is where scalability comes in. When we say scalability, we refer to the capacity of your business to grow and the capability of your strategies, policies and processes to sustain this growth. The questions to ask are; does the business have a growth capacity? Do your teams, processes and assets have the capability to accommodate such growth? What are the effects of not having a scaling plan? The rst is confusion. Orders would begin to get mixed up and you would realize that you are short-staffed. There would be problems with communication and your rate of production or service delivery would not be able to match ordering capacity of your ever-growing customer base, especially if you have gotten the other things from previous chapter right and you have a fantastic product or service. All these problems would accumulate to mean one thing, unhappy customers. Most manual or slightly automated processes that worked well during your initial start-up stages, when the business was still really small, would no longer serve you. You would notice that these processes are not moving fast enough to be able to meet demand. As the manager and business owner, you would nd out that you are constantly busy with figuring out ways to meet demand and placate customer, rather than focus on improvement processes. All these would stress you as the business owner.
What if you already have an improvement process planed? This is part of business scaling. When you scale a business, you create the platform for enabling, supporting and sustaining growth and development. You give the business the ability to grow unhindered or without impediment. Doing this requires you to do lots of planning, spending some fund and equipping the business with the required set of cost effective processes, staff, partners, systems and technology. Now, let us discuss the important steps you can execute to scale your business;
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
EVALUATE AND PLAN The rst thing to do is to evaluate your business. Take a critical look at your business to be sure you are ready for growth. Know where your business stands, it helps you to know what needed to be done differently. A critical part of growth is increased sales. This is why you must make a strategy on the methods you intend to deploy to increase sales. The next thing is to assume that your sales tripled or doubled over a short time and evaluate again. Do you have the staff and resources to take care of new orders, without stressing yourself and others too much? When you evaluate, don’t overestimate the business capability or make an elaborate forecast as this may make you get overstaffed and procure more resources than needed. A good plan starts with a detailed, informed and realistic sales growth forecast that carefully consider all factors such as the
existence of competition, the market dynamism and government policies. The sales forecast should take as a decisive factor, the size of new customers, the amount of new orders and the expected revenue for these increases. Next, create a spreadsheet that projects the increments monthly.
Have it in mind that your degree of precision would determine how realistic the sales generation plan you would deploy would be. In the same vein, create an expense forecast, that is, project the costs the business would pay out over this period, also broken down into monthly forecast. The expense forecast should be determined by the technology you intend to add, the number of new staff and their earnings, additional infrastructure and processes for handling the forecasted new orders.
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS Now, critically examine your current pro t and loss account and see how these increments would impact the items therein. Certainly, your expenses would go up, but ‘where’ and ‘how’ becomes your primary concern. It is wise, therefore, to create a separate spreadsheet for expenses that would be needed to actualize your sales forecast. This planning requires a great deal of thinking and researching before you can develop realistic cost estimates. However, if properly done, it would help your business to grow and you would be prepared for most eventualities.
GET THE FUND Scaling a business requires spending and you cannot spend what you don’t have. When scaling up a business, there is every possibility that you would need to hire new people to your staff size, upgrade or add to your equipment and facilities, create new process line (especially a reporting system for measuring and managing results) and deploy new technology or update the existing ones. All these would cost you money, but where would you get these funds? For me, I strongly advise bootstraps. However, bootstrapping is slow and it takes a relatively long time to grow a business using bootstrapping alone. Taking part in a small business grant contest may also. You can research this and participate simply by having a fantastic business story to tell about your business. However, this is a probable option. A more feasible approach would be to list potential banks funding to help speed up your business. An example of such is a business loan. However, conduct thorough research to determine the bank with the best interest rate to choose in securing these loans. Know and much you would need and apply for this amount only.
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
ACTUALIZE THE SALES While evaluating and planning, you would make an assumption that you would sell more. Now, you need to work towards securing those sales. But how would know if you have the sales process and structure to help you generate increased sales? It is simple. Just evaluate your sales structure holistically to determine if you have the following: • LEADS: Do you have enough lead ow to generate more lead in order to increase your potential client base and hence, your number of customers. If you do not have this or you feel the system on ground is not strong enough to ensure more lead in ow, you might want to increase your PR and bring your business out to the surface some more. Making your customer your brand ambassador can also help, as a customer who feels positive about your business is likely to tell others about your business. How do you this? By providing top quality services and products that give your customers maximal utility and make them feel cared about. • LEAD TRACKING & MANAGEMENT: You must a marketing and sales systems that would not only help you to log leads but also allows you to show the progress you have made with them; a system that helps you to manage the process from lead identification to the conversion of such lead to customers. • ENOUGH SALES REP: Once the lead generation and management are ensured, next is to check if you have the sales force to follow through with the leads and close them into actual sales. This is as important as every other aspect because this is what makes the actual sales happen.
• ORDER MANAGEMENT: With an effective sales team, the orders would soon start pouring in. Now, you must check to ensure that you have a robust system for managing the sales orders. You must ensure that each customer gets exactly what was ordered and at the time promised too. • BILLING SYSTEM: Once the orders are attended to, the next thing is billing for such product or service. Does your business have an appropriate and effective billing system? Is there a receivable function in place to follow up with billing in order to make sure that you collect all invoices? All these are what you must ascertain to ensure that sales are securely secured.
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
DEPLOY TECHNOLOGY Scaling business can be a lot easier and even cheaper when you make use of technology. Technology helps to amplify effort and thus, you can upscale with less labor, with a wise investment in technology. Automation of some of your process would help you to run at reduced cost and makes your work more effective and efficient. Once you deploy technology, ensure system integration. The systems overseeing your different processes must be able to communicate rather than being a stand-alone system. There are, already in the market, enterprise resource planning software for small and medium scale enterprises that can help you to fast track processes and at the same time, give you an integrated business solution. Along with these, you can deploy both network and communication network like customer, printers and telephones.
Staff or Outsource Despite technological investments, you would still need hands to run the day to day operations of the business as well as even man the software. Next, you evaluate if you have enough staffs to cater to your customer. Evaluate your industry to know the average number of customer that one single service representative can successfully handle. Evaluate your manufacturing or production line and determine if you have enough people to ensure meeting your production capacity. How about management level? Do you have enough management staff? It is not every tasks or function that are economical to hire someone to execute in-house. Sometimes, it is better to outsource these services. However, when outsourcing, ensure that you use trusted businesses or people who would not delay your process rate with their unreliability. In most cases, these third parties would have more staff, technological investment and industry know-how to handle such function more effectively and ef ciently more than your business. Doing this function in-house may waste your time and other resources. It is rather better that you trust them to a reliable and economical third party to handle.
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
DOMINATING YOUR MARKET SPACE Now that you know what to do to upscale your business, you would need to own your market place to sustain such an upscale. How do you do this?
UNDERSTAND YOUR TARGETED AUDIENCE In business, it’s people rst. This is why most businesses understand the need to be customercentric. This why you must understand who your customers are. When you understand them, serving them the right services or products becomes way easier. When you understand your customers need and serve them their needs plus their want, which you would understand from studying them, you can develop a system to serve them better. Doing this would ensure customer retention as well as the generation of new customers. This is because the old customers would spread goodwill about your business and thus create more willing customers for you at no additional cost. Success is easy to come by when you have this in place.
DEVELOP MARKET ENTRY AND PENETRATION STRATEGIES Whether for an existing market or entering a new market, you must have both a market entry and a market penetration strategy. If you are a service providing business, signing business partnership agreements with businesses whose process line or product deployment requires your services would be a strategy. There are several other strategies that you can develop from studying the systems used by bigger companies and modifying them to work for your own business too.
Partnerships Keep You in Business You can do it all by yourself. Study your business and know your threats and weaknesses. Go into partnership agreements with another business with strength in the areas where your business is weak; a symbiotic business relationship that leaves both parties in a win-win situation. Breaking into a new territory is easier when you are able to partner with existing businesses in that environment.
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS
STRATEGIZE TO OWN THE MARKET No matter how big you get or how small you remain, there would always be competitors trying to outdo you. But staying ahead of the competition is up to you and the strategies you can develop to run your business more uniquely. Stretch yourself to beat everyone else in your industry by ensuring a better service or product coverage. You must aim to become the face of the market, as this would help you discover better market opportunities developing within your industry before any other business can notice them.
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