Scaling Your Business
Scaling Your Business 101
It’s an exciting time for any business owner when they’re ready to scale their business. However, there is a right and a wrong time to consider scaling. For example, if your business is still struggling to keep up with day-to-day operations, then it’s not the right time to scale. However, if you’re keeping up with sales, the sales process runs smoothly, and customers are leaving satisfied; then it’s time to think about growing your business.
Time & Money
As with everything in life, time is limited. In order to maximize your business and grow it to its fullest potential, it’s important to see where you are spending the most of your resources – both time and money. Are those resources being well spent? Is there anywhere in the process that you can cut down, so you can reallocate those funds and that time to dedicate to adding in other processes to expand your offerings to keep customers engaged?
When looking at cutting down time and money in a certain area of your business, it’s crucial that it doesn’t come at the cost of quality. If your quality decreases, so will your customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is incredibly important when scaling, as will be discussed later.
Scaling up Funding
Most likely scaling will cost money, and not just the money you’re saving from cutting certain parts of the process or automating it. You may have to invest money into additional software programs, expanding your workforce, or even purchasing more office space – regardless, additional funding will be necessary. There are many different ways to get funding, so find the best fit for you and your business.
Some options of funding include business credit cards, commercial loans (both secure and unsecure), commercial mortgage loans, and more. Depending on what your scaling plans include will determine which option or several options will be ideal for you. Raising Private Equity from a VC fund or a PE House is a good option, as they provide long term capital and provide guidance and non-executive with sector experience.
The Team
Getting the right team in place is an essential part of scaling your business, you will need the right FD or CFO to be able handle growth and cope with the financial pressures that scaling up brings. FD Capital Recruitment can help you here, we are London based specialists in FD and CFO recruitment, reach out to our team and we’ll find your the perfect candidate.
Feedback from Clients
It’s difficult to scale when you don’t know what your customers want. The best way to scale is by keeping clients happy and making sure to always increase the amount of value you deliver to them. By asking for feedback either through surveys or having customer service representatives ask directly, you will be able to get an idea for what’s missing in your current business and what can be improved.
Ideally, you will scale in a way that benefits your clients and fills a need that you’re currently not. Guessing what that is though will lead to a lot of lost money, time, and dissatisfaction among clients. This can be easily avoided by implementing the above, so even though it may take some time to gather that feedback – it’s invaluable in the long run!
Leveraging & Building Relationships
There are so many people in the business world who are able to help you scale and grow to new heights. Networking allows you to find others who are willing to work with you and will open their networks up to you.
You immediately have a wider reach and potential market. If you repeat this with several influential people and businesses, then you have a huge potential opportunity for growth.
Final Thoughts
There are many more ways to scale your business including focusing on boosting your sales, outsourcing, hiring the right people, and using software like CRM programs to streamline your sales process and provide a better experience. Regardless of where you start, the most important thing is that you start somewhere.
If you’re looking to hire the right people to help make scaling your business easier, consider using FD Capital Recruitment to find the perfect fit for your Finance Director and CFO position. You and your business won’t regret it!
