Growth is one of the most important parameters to judge the business performance, and it is the same for big companies, corporations, and small businesses. In modern businesses, nothing is more important than growth as measured by increased revenues that point to the growth rate, especially for construction takeoff services. At the same time, startups and younger companies are keen to scale up their business to ensure exponential growth. As an entrepreneur, you might always be thinking of business growth and obsessed to scale your business. It means that you have the dual goal of growth and scaling. Before you plan to achieve the goals, you must have a clear idea about what it mean to scale your business because growth and scaling are entirely different, although apparently, people might think these to be the same. At best, you can think about these as two sides of the same coin.
Growth or scale your business – which should you prioritize?
When any business starts rolling smoothly, and revenue starts flowing, it indicates that the company is on the growth path. The target is to increase revenue by adding new resources like capital, technology, or people. The focus is on increasing productivity and sales figures to bring in more revenue and strengthen the company’s financials. Growth has a linear dimension, which means that the output directly results from the extent of input. It is like adding more fuel to a vehicle to drive more miles.
When you search scale your business, it means you will discover that relation between resources and revenue is entirely different. Converse to growth, scaling aims at increasing revenue without a considerable increase in resources. Scaling means achieving more with less, and processes that you want to scale can provide more output without extra effort or little effort. A typical example of scaling is email marketing, which allows enterprises to expand their reach with the least effort since sending emails to 10 people and 10,000 people does not require much extra effort. Another example of scaling is an insurance company that scaled or increased its operations by switching to a cloud-based phone system.
Growing a business
Now that you got the theoretical explanation for what does it mean to scale your business let us look at some other aspects of growth. Growth is about increasing revenue, but it can refer to the increase of other resources like adding more employees, expanding the customer base, or opening new offices. The augmentation of resources results in revenue increase. However, to maintain constant growth, you must keep adding more resources which are often challenging for small business owners. To increase revenue, you must sell more which means you need to produce more by increasing the production capacity by adding more men machines and infusing more capital. It means that growth comes at a cost that can be pretty significant.
Scaling a business
How to scale your business? Sustaining growth is costly because you need to tank up to cover larger distances. The more fuel or resources you add, the more revenue generation. Modern-day entrepreneurs and business owners want to scale up their businesses to increase revenue without resources. By controlling costs under control, it is possible to increase revenue.
Google is the most glaring example of the successful scaling of the business. It recently implemented adding customers, whether free users for ad-supported content or paying business clients without a significant cost increase. As of 2017, Google employed 88,000 people while having over a billion users for its seven products.
To make an impact in the industry and ensure the prolonged survival of the business, it makes perfect sense to scale it up. However, it is critical to choose the right time to scale your business. Suppose you have an ongoing small business after a successful startup that enjoyed growth for some years but wants to become bigger. In that case, it is time to choose between scaling up the company faster and sticking to the regular growth rate.
