How to Scale and Grow Your Business | Universal Creative Solutions

Scaling a business can support healthy growth by increasing revenue and efficiency, but it will not always be a smooth process. There are hundreds of ways to achieve growth for small businesses, but there is no one-size-fits all solution. If you want to scale your business, you need to be able to create a plan of where the business is going, what revenue you are targeting to generate with your planned timeline, and what percent of the market share you're attempting to control.

There are certain factors that play a significant role in how a business can become successful, like having the right people or the right strategies and learning what works best for your business. All of it usually comes with time and experience. For this reason, 20% of businesses fail within the first two years of their inception as many struggle to find the right path.

Despite the statistics, researchers and the media telling you that the odds are against you and the likelihood of failure is high, you will always have countless chances to try again and succeed. One of the best ways to prepare for tough times, that require you to make difficult decisions, is to look at the path successful entrepreneurs and CEOs have already taken. Large companies were start-ups before they got big. They started with ideas that needed an entrepreneur or a small team of pioneers to build and lead them and not all succeeded in their first attempt.

With that being said, if you want to learn how to overcome adversity and successfully scale your business, following the important tips listed below can promote sustainable growth:

Invest In Your Business

As a business grows, the next goal is to increase its profit margins, using more resources to accommodate the opportunities for continued expansion and growth. Scaling a business requires additional resources, and the connection between the two is not linear. You first need to determine if your business is scalable at all. Sometimes it is better to remain lean and successful as a small business because scaling involves an excessive amount of resources or initial investment. Be honest with yourself when you review your offers. If you don’t know why you got into the business in the first place, you will fail if you don’t take the necessary steps to scale a business with the clarity of a detailed plan. You should always be aware of where the company stands and what scaling potential it has. While growth is important to ensure long-term success,scaling does not necessarily mean that revenues will rise faster without increasing costs. The scale of your business can only grow if you add resources at the same speed as your revenue generation to cover every expenditure and not at a rate faster than that progress.

When you want your business to grow, keeping track of your progress will determine whether your business can avoid being in the red when you arrive. That’s why learning how to scale your business while pursuing growth will save you money and headaches for the long-term. You should also consider your time as a valuable resource, and if you don’t offer enough of it in your business, you’re not investing properly. Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time chasing growth, and to scale your business and achieve your growth goals, you need to manage your time better each day to make the most of it.

Simplify Processes

Successful business leaders have paved their way by learning how to simplify, take on, and make things less complex. Simplifying processes makes it easier to stay in touch with the people who are the biggest component of your growth and success. Part of Apple’s success under Steve Jobs was its ability to eliminate overly complicated things. He was notorious for abandoning projects he considered foreign, and he used this philosophy and business method in the area of product launch and workflow development.

The CEOs who are most effective at reducing complexity tend to have a vision that is well communicated and led by their employees and the ability to change the course of action when they realize that certain strategies are not delivering the desired results. For a growing company, CEOs and business leaders need to be aware of the impact of this growing complexity and take action to continuously simplify the organization’s operations and strategy. As products are developed, and organizations grow, complexity develops as corporate strategies change. This complexity slows down business and inhibits growth.

Focus on Your Customers

We can’t stress enough the importance of customer loyalty for your business and its impact on your growth and success. While customer acquisition is important in any business, you need to focus on all customers, especially existing ones. Customers’ perception of the company can make or destroy your growth potential. Customers will talk about having a high-quality experience with your product or service and inspire others, or they can discourage and influence people to avoid your business if their experience is a negative one. However, you don’t have to restructure your business model entirely when you are trying to improve the experience for existing customers; you just have to work in a way that anticipates their needs and solves issues that stand in the way of potential future purchases. Fulfilling customer needs doesn’t have to be time-consuming or intense. Focus on the simple things like communicating, gaining clarity on their needs, and assessing how your business can help the clients achieve their goals.

Empower Employees

Empowering your employees to be proactive and motivated to help customers can be very beneficial to your business as this will also shape your company’s culture in a positive way. Any effort to make your employees feel valued, such as extended paid leave and other benefits or simply a recognition of their performance can contribute significantly to a business’s success. When employees feel valued, they passionately share your vision and do what they can to help your business thrive. If employees feel valued, they are emotionally invested and want to make their contribution count. Look at your business from all angles, meet key people in your business, talk to your employees and find out what resources they need to do a better and more efficient job. Invest in the resources that help you today and scale those resources to grow the company. When you invest in the right areas, whether financially or emotionally, your investment will flow into perks and benefits.

Companies invest a lot of money in their employees, and for good reason: They grow by retaining and attracting top talent who is more loyal, have a more fulfilling work-life balance, and therefore work harder. If you want to grow your business, one of your goals should be to hire intelligent and talented people for different jobs. Developing a flexible management team that can grow with your business is an important component in learning how to scale your business. As an entrepreneur, you cannot be involved in everything, but it is important to delegate duties to other, more suitable people and to take on some of the work. Many start-ups and small businesses survive by investing in their human resources departments, while some fast-growing companies use contractors to sustain growth because it takes time to find long-term solutions.When your business starts to grow, a lack of human resources structure and policies can cause cracks in the foundation of your organization and cause good things that have been done to dissolve and good salespeople to look around and question their future.

Don’t Take Shortcuts

Growth is not a straight line upwards but more like climbing a mountain, entailing a slow, steady, strategic climb. Look out for your grip, and be careful of loose stones on your way up until you reach the summit. If you feel comfortable in your company and are aware of your environment, you can anticipate changes and adapt when needed. When your business starts to grow, you might be tempted to cut corners and try to take the easy route to success to achieve your next goal faster. This is the fastest way to cripple your business. Any action you take now will have an impact later on, and the ethics, values, and integrity of your business are often compromised at the expense of customers and employees and even your own when you decide to take shortcuts.

Ask For Help

The most successful entrepreneurs become effective leaders because they are good at leading people, and they always have the answers. This is why, too often, entrepreneurs see a call for help as a sign of weakness, but we all know how valuable it is to ask for help in turning your vision into something real. Great leaders achieve success by placing their efforts in realizing their vision, even if it means by seeking help and inspiring people to help them get there. You would be amazed at how many people in your network are willing to stand up for you and give you everything that you need to succeed. It’s okay not to know how to do something on your own, and nobody expects you to always have all the answers and skills.

Test New Ideas

When an opportunity arises, it can be difficult to refuse it, especially if it is in the form of a new product or service. You may also be inclined to experiment and plunge into new things to see if they are related to growth and help you achieve it. It is important to remember that not every idea that crosses the conference table is a great idea. However, if you spend time analyzing and developing your ideas, less favorable and less attractive ideas can be shaped into better ones. Study your market and conduct surveys and ask people what they think. If you don’t learn from what they say, you can get caught up in trying to do too many things, and everything happens so quickly that you get overwhelmed. At the end of the day, you have too many resources and the distribution of too many projects with too few resources.

You may want to start by understanding your current pain points to see the changes that you can do to brainstorm new ideas for the business. Make use of your data and study your customers by reevaluating your current system. Review how your customer goes through the sales funnel, what issues you are currently dealing with, how you deal with your customers, your employees, and your competitors, and what complaints and problems people have with your products and services. If you are careful about your data, you can correct leaks in your sales funnel that restrict purchases, such as a lack of customer loyalty or poor customer service.

Main Takeaway

If you are not willing to invest in your own business, you will have a very hard time growing it. The decision to expand is always the natural next step, but it is not limited to simply increasing the size of your business. You need to expand your company’s growth plan without incurring losses in the first few years. You have to break the bad habits that hold companies back and take the necessary steps to effectively grow and expand. If you gain more customers without proportionately increasing your costs, your business is scalable and has the potential to become more profitable. Again, a company that scales efficiently is one that increases and grows its sales while spending an equal percentage of its revenue as growth expenditure.

So, for example, if you want to scale your business, you should be careful about changing the way you operate as that will affect your operation costs and will only weigh you down with costs that you cannot cope with. While it is important to spend money on things that help you work and accomplish your mission to ensure that your business can handle growth, you should also spend some of it on marketing. This includes marketing to attract new customers and retain existing customers.

It can help identify opportunities where your actions have a significant impact on the growth and scalability of your organization. Start drafting your growth and marketing strategy today with Universal Creative Solutions to ensure long-term business success as you scale your business.