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:
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…
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 your processes should generate maximum productivity and should be standardized and repeatable. Make sure you test each of your processes to see if they will work on a larger scale. If not, look into solutions that will work and grow with you as you scale.
Lastly, make sure you have a team in place to help you scale. Hire or outsource your team strategically. Where do you need the most help? Where are your weaknesses? Chances are, when scaling; you won’t be able to do everything on your own. Think about the team you want to create and work with for not only sales but your vendors or other suppliers as well. You also want to make sure you have your finances covered, from your bookkeeping and understanding your financial statements to finding investors and financial institutions you want to work with. You want a team that you can work with to handle all of the major tasks in your growth stage and ensure they are ready to take on additional revenues without needing to add a significant number of additional team members to sustain the growth. Once you have an existing team that can handle future growth, you are ready to scale. Try to set your team up so that your business could run without you. This goes back to delegating and ensuring you have a team you can count on with processes that are documented. Always ask your team if there is a way to improve the process and be more efficient.
Although there is no one specific formula or set of steps to take to scale your business since every business is different, these common things to implement and consider when you are ready to scale will improve your success considerably. If you feel like you need additional help with your business finances, business strategy, or you find you are holding your business back with the wrong mindset and are unable to grow your business or scale your business to meet the vision you have for it in the future, let’s talk. Sign up for one of my free consultation sessions, and we’ll take a look at where you currently are in your business and where you’d like to see yourself in the future. Sometimes you just need someone from outside your business to look inside and help you see where you could take steps to improve. I’m excited to announce that my 100th podcast episode is coming up in the next few weeks. To celebrate, I am giving away a four-week business strategy and coaching package to one of my lucky podcast listeners. My one-on-one business strategy and coaching sessions really help clients get specific about what they need to work on to reach the next level in their business. In each session, we work together to make plans specific to your business and create a plan to follow through on your intentions. As a CPA, Business Strategist, and Coach, I help business owners just like you to push through and stop limiting yourself with the success you could be achieving in your business. Whether you are unsure of the next steps you need to make, you want to get more sales but are unsure how to do it, or you need to gain a deeper understanding of your business finances so that you can be more profitable, I can help. Clients come to me because they know that I am knowledgeable in both the financial aspect of business as well as how important it is to have a strategy and work through your mindset and whatever is holding you back from reaching the highest vision you have for yourself and your business. By helping you make the right decisions and holding you accountable so that you follow through with your plans, you get to see your results much faster. You could be seeing success like this in your business. If you’d like to be entered in the drawing for the four-week one-on-one coaching package I am giving away; you need to sign up for one of my free consultation sessions by September 3rd, 2022. I always offer these free consultation sessions, but when you sign up for one of my free consultation sessions from now through September 3rd, 2022, you could also be the winner of the four-week business strategy and coaching package I’m giving away. You can go to www.FinancialAdventure.com/Contact-Us to schedule your session. During this consultation, we’ll spend up to one hour together going over where you currently are in your business, where you’d like to see yourself and your business in the future, and take action to get you started on the path to success. You’ll walk away with action steps so that you can start moving forward in your business right away. If you are already a one-on-one client of mine, that’s not a problem. Just let me know that you’d like to be entered into the drawing on our next call, and you’ll also have a chance to win. I’ve been helping business owners and bookkeepers achieve their goals for over 25 years, and it’s the best feeling when I see the joy it brings my clients when they follow through with their aspirations. I am looking forward to meeting you in a consultation session soon. I’ll post links to this and other valuable resources for business owners and bookkeepers where you are listening to this podcast and in the show notes.
And, you know I’m going to ask…what’s at least one thing you will take away from this episode that will help your business succeed and grow your bottom line? If you need some accountability, join our PRIVATE Facebook community and post your action item, we’d love to support you.
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