97: Get Ready To Scale Your Business Whether You Are Starting A Business, Self-Employed

97: Get Ready To Scale Your Business Whether You Are Starting A Business, Self-Employed, A Solopreneur, Entrepreneur, Mompreneur, Business Owner, Side Hustler, Freelancer, Bookkeeper, Virtual Assistant, Or VA

As a business owner, you want your business to be successful, and that may mean growing your business or maybe even scaling your business. There are many business owners who think that growing and scaling your business are the same, but in fact, there are some pretty significant differences. In today’s podcast episode, I am walking you through the differences between growing and scaling your business, as well as some of the major points you need to consider when you are ready to scale your business. While there is no one specific formula or steps to follow when you scale your business since every business is different, you will want to make sure you are aware of the common things to implement and consider when you are ready to scale. Having these items on your radar as you are running your business, whether you are a self-employed individual, a solopreneur, entrepreneur, mompreneur, freelancer, small business owner, a remote, virtual, online, or in-house bookkeeper, or a virtual assistant or VA will help you as you progress your businesses growth and get ready to scale your business. By understanding the difference between growing and scaling your business, you’ll be able to strategically set your business for success. These tips are essential whether you are using a computerized software system like QuickBooks, Xero, Wave, or FreshBooks for your business finances; or doing your bookkeeping manually with an Excel spreadsheet or even a Google Document…

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Show Notes:

Welcome Back…When you started your business, did you have dreams that one day your business would be a huge success? What does that success look like for you? Many businesses have plans from the start to grow their business, but others want to take their business one step further and scale to another level of success. Having an understanding of what the difference between growing and scaling your business will not only help your business as you are growing, but it will help you to set your business up so that you are able to scale in the future.

I will start by explaining the difference between growing and scaling a business. Growing your business is when your business is increasing its revenues, but it is also increasing costs by utilizing more resources to handle the growth. Scaling, on the other hand, is when your business has the ability to grow your revenues at a faster rate than taking on or increasing your costs. You are able to bring in more money without incurring additional efforts or expenses. For example, if you are a personal trainer offering one-on-one training and you experience an increase in revenue of $25,000, you already have a full schedule of clients, which means that you will need to hire additional personal trainers to handle this influx of revenues for your one-on-one training. Your expenses will increase in proportion to your revenues which means your business has indeed grown, but it hasn’t scaled. Suppose, on the other hand, you were preparing your personal training business to scale. In that case, you may offer group training sessions where you could easily increase your revenues while maintaining your expenses since you could continue to provide the group sessions without hiring additional help. Being able to add additional revenue and increase the demands in your business while maintaining your costs will allow you to scale.

Scaling is part of growing your business, but it means your gains are greater than your losses, and you have improved profit margins. Ultimately, you want to make sure you have a business plan, a strategic marketing plan, and be able to forecast your future growth. You’ll want to have a plan in place with goals and milestones you’ll reach along the way. Create a budget for where you are now all the way through each goal you want to reach. You’ll want to make sure as you are scaling that you are consistently increasing your sales and your expenses are not increasing in proportion to your growth. Before you start, you will need to know where your business is right now and where you want the vision of your future business to be. Next, you’ll need to know how you will get your business to where you want it to be while staying true to your vision and purpose. You’ll want to have a sales strategy that is profitable, easy to repeat, and can ultimately scale. When you are scaling your business, you need to be ready to problem solve and overcome any failures along the way. You need to use your failures as a way to improve your processes, have a positive mindset, and always be ready to pivot or change your strategy to achieve success. This is one of the areas that many of my clients want to work with me on in their businesses. Being able to utilize a failure to your advantage can be hard when you are running your business by yourself. It’s hard to not take a failure personally and see the possibilities and potential on your own. Together, my clients and I are often able to work through and overcome these failures in addition to finding solutions that continue to move their business forward and get them back on track. You need to have the right mindset, be committed to growth, and have the ambition to follow your plans to scale your business. Having a solid foundation is necessary before you scale your business.

First, let’s talk about the product or service you offer in your business. You’ll want to build your product or service, establish a market to generate sales and then scale. If you have a service-based business or a business with little or no inventory and low overhead, it will be much easier to scale, but if you have a supply chain, make sure that they can keep up with your new demands when scaling and if they are unable, make sure you have an alternative or plans for your future scaling. Make sure that your product or service and the delivery methods of them are solid. If you need to make improvements, make sure you do this prior to scaling, so you don’t run into a huge problem down the road. Your onboarding system should be smooth while creating exactly the right experience for your customers. Listen to your customers, employees, and community and ask for feedback to see if there are any problems and fix them so that you can continue to have a positive customer satisfaction rate. Focus on your customer and be a leader in your industry to deliver exactly what your customer wants. You’ll often discover your business finds a niche that generates revenues for the business as you focus on specializing in that area. Take time to look at your business through the eyes of your customer. Go through every process that your customer goes through and ensure you are satisfied with the results. You never want to lose a customer due to the lack of customer service, and client retention will allow you to generate additional sales. It is much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain existing customers.

You’ll want to make sure you are creating efficient processes for everything you do in your business to get more done in less or the same amount of time as you scale. Utilize technology whenever you can. You should have processes documented so that anyone in the business could complete them without needing instructions from others. This includes your customer support, IT and technology, marketing, and sales processes. Make sure you have a good communication system as well as a customer relationship management and project management or workflow automation system. Each of you