Growing and scaling your business is an exciting part of being your boss. Whether you want to expand your customer base, launch an eCommerce website, or renovate your space, you need to take the proper steps to prepare your business for growth. In this way, you’re perfectly positioned to take advantage of business opportunities that come your way and sustain long-term growth at the same time.
Here are some steps you need to take to scale your self-employed business
1. Know your purpose and establish customer loyalty
Establishing customer loyalty and scaling your business go hand in hand. But before you reach out to your customers, you need to focus on building employee loyalty. It shows when your employees are happy and satisfied in their job, allowing them to pass on their enthusiasm to your customers, establish a positive relationship with them, and ultimately turn them into loyal customers.
In scaling your business, you also need to clearly define your purpose or figure out why you’re running your business. Knowing your “whys” and successfully communicating this with your employees can help boost their morale and productivity. Employees are usually loyal to employers and companies whose values align with theirs.
2. Create a business process map
You’ve probably heard of developing a business plan, but are you familiar with business process mapping? Business process mapping is a detailed diagram or chart outlining the steps to complete a process, like hiring employees, planning for automation, preparing for business audits and more.
Almost every aspect of your business has a process. Creating a business process map helps you understand the impacts of specific changes, streamline the way you do business, and realign the employees involved in these processes. The people in your company will know exactly what to do, when, and how to perform their tasks.
When creating a business process map, you first need to identify which process you want to map and what you want to gain from it. Next, gather the necessary information by answering who, where, and when. Once you have all the details in place, interview the people involved in the process, giving you an idea of how to improve. Finally, draw your maps and analyze them.
3. Work on perfecting your products and services
Make quality part of your company culture as early as now. Embed the quality principle in your organization and teamwork. Everyone should be on the same page regarding providing high-quality products and services.
Performing market research helps you understand the demand for the product and service you’re offering. Before launching, always test and analyze them. During this process, you may need to fix errors, add missing features, or adjust the functionality to meet your consumers’ expectations.
Competition is tough, and standing out in a competitive market can be challenging for small business owners. But most of these products and services available in the market fail to satisfy the needs of their target audience in terms of quality. You can establish a competitive advantage by thoroughly understanding product quality, and creating informed decisions on manufacturing your products or offering services that exceed their expectations.
4. Build the right team members for growth and cultivate professional relationships
When running a business, you can’t do everything on your own. Building a reliable and competent management team is an essential component when it comes to scaling for growth. Here are some of the things you need to do to hire the right employee for your business:
- Create a consistent hiring plan. This may take some time, but this ensures that the candidates you hire will undergo the same hiring process, which helps you assess them quickly.
- Write a compelling job description to attract high-quality applicants. Instead of using a template you found online, create a description that looks for more generative skills, like teamwork, creativity, problem-solving, etc.
- When reviewing applications and conducting interviews, be mindful of how applicants answer. Do their values align with your company’s culture, values, and goals?
Your team also goes beyond your employees. To scale your business, you need to establish positive relationships with your suppliers, partners, and other organizations you’re working with.
The community you create around your business serves as your foundation, so you will have more support and leverage as you grow and expand. A solid network of suppliers, vendors, partners, etc., is a valuable tool that every small business owner. That said, take the time to build a team – not just your employees – that will help take your business to the next level.
5. Know when to delegate tasks
Once you’ve built a strong team, the next thing you need to do is to delegate specific tasks. Delegating allows you to focus on more critical tasks that need your attention. However, according to Dr. Scott Williams, delegating is more than just taking a bunch of tasks off your plate.
Delegating empowers your team and builds trust within the organization. It shows that you respect your employees’ skills and expertise and trust their discretion. When employees feel valued and trusted, it improves their commitment to work, the company, and their managers. Delegating allows them to gain new knowledge and develop new skills that will help further their career.
6. Build brand awareness
Your brand is more than your logo, style, font size, color palettes, or marketing materials. Brand identity refers to the culmination of how your brand feels, looks, and speaks to your target market. It heavily influences customer experience and affects how your customers view your business as you grow.
Creating a brand identity that will stick in the minds of your audience takes time, research, and critical thinking. However, the results are worth it.
Here are some of the ways you can build brand awareness to scale your small business:
- You can’t build brand awareness if you don’t understand your customers. Take the time to research your primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences and develop buyer personas for each. The more specific you are, the better.
- Interview your employees. The people who work for you should know your brand well. They’ll have important points to share regarding how your customers perceive your company.
- Create assets, such as your logo, iconography, typography, color palettes, photography, style guides, and other marketing campaigns, like you can use Planoly for social media campaigns.
- Create your brand story: what your brand believes in, the pain points you address and how you solved these problems, where your business is headed, etc.
7. Don’t stop innovating
Successful entrepreneurs are great innovators, but you don’t have to do it alone. When scaling your business, don’t stop innovating and adapting. Just like embedding quality into your organization, you can make your company and employees more innovative by viewing innovation as a crucial part of your business, like marketing, manufacturing, or accounting.
Here are some of the ways you can encourage everyone to innovate:
- Get a fresh perspective. Innovations involve solving problems and challenges your target audience encounters. However, many employees are bound in their silos and fail to explore beyond their areas of expertise. You can rotate employees every quarter or twice a year so they gain a broader understanding of the roles in the company. Or have managers assume someone else’s role for the day.
- Enroll your team members in online courses to help develop ideas and manage innovation initiatives.
The bottom line
There are no shortcuts when it comes to scaling your business. The key to successful and sustainable growth is consistency and access to complex data, like valuable customer information. Scaling your business also means that you’ll make tough decisions along the way. Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks, and don’t let the fear of failure hinder you from scaling your business.
