7 top tips for scaling up your business

The thought of scaling your business might fill you with equal measures of dread and excitement. But thinking about it and doing it are two very different things. If you’ve established your business and you’re ready to take the next step, here are some tips to help you on your way to scaling success.

How to grow and scale your business

Here are seven things to consider when scaling your business.

1. Set business goals

If you don’t map out your business goals, you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. Think about what growth looks like to you. Maybe you want to double the staff on the payroll, open a new store in another town, or take your business online to take advantage of the 34% of people around the world using online platforms to meet their consumer needs.

You can’t plan for scaling success without defining ‘success’.

2. Invest in tech to streamline operations

Investing in technology might seem flashy, but automating menial tasks can boost productivity and efficiency across your organisation. There’s no point in investing in it once you’ve already grown; imagine all the disruption when you eventually migrate every bit of data across.

As a business scales, processes become more complex. Let’s say you have two members of staff submitting business expenses for reimbursement each month. Well, after you hire more employees, you’ll have more to process. Same with invoice management. At the moment, you might manage these processes manually, which can be time-consuming and riddled with human errors. When your workforce grows, so will every business process.

3. Conduct a skills gap

When scaling your small business, you should understand which skills you need to grow quickly — hiring because you like the candidate isn’t enough at this stage. You need to recruit team members with skills you lack, whether that’s in-house or outsourcing — e.g. hiring an accountancy firm to do all your complex tax and leave calculations or hiring a marketing manager with specific experience in your industry.

Once you know which skills you need, building a team becomes more focused and driven. You’ll build your dream team in no time.

4. Implement knowledge management practices

Knowledge management is a practice where you refuse to keep employee knowledge in a silo. That means others can benefit from internal wisdom, instead of it walking right out the door when someone leaves your company.

Using a basic example, let’s say there’s one person who knows how to use the office printer. By sharing how to use it and writing down instructions, saving them in a digital file or platform everyone can access, means everyone can learn how to use the printer without having to ask for help, streamlining knowledge and empowering all employees.

5. Understand your business’s financial health

To scale your business, you need to have a complete picture of your business finances. With this knowledge, you can make informed growth decisions. That means you need a detailed understanding of incomings and outgoings, working capital, debts etc.

Once you know all this, you’re in a better position for sustainable growth. For example, can you afford to apply for a business loan to make your expansion plans a reality? Or can you cut costs to reinvest elsewhere in the business?

6. Collect customer feedback

You need to know what works and what doesn't work with your products and services. That's why collecting customer feedback is a must. Understanding patterns in complaints and which parts of your offering are strongest puts you in a great position when scaling your business.

Let's say you find out your customer service isn't up to scratch, you need to fix this before scaling to put you in the best possible position to scale successfully.

Collecting and analysing customer feedback should be something you do before, during and after scaling. Learning from those who purchase from you is key to building and maintaining long-term growth.

7. Analyse competitors

Analyse your competition, particularly those who have scaled successfully — what have they done right or wrong and how would you do things differently? By analysing your competitors, you can identify gaps in the market, which helps you differentiate your product or service, keeping ahead of trends and giving you a competitive advantage.

Don't rush into scaling your business

It can be tempting to scale your business immediately, perhaps before you're ready. It's not just about having the right mindset, you need to be in a healthy financial position to minimise business risk, your product needs to have proven market demand and you need stable infrastructure to facilitate growth. Whatever you decide, there are plenty of options for business support in all areas of scaling or simply maintaining a business.

If you're ready to scale, you might need financial support. We work with lenders to offer flexible and affordable business finance solutions.

Our free comparison tool helps you instantly compare eligible business finance options, simply share a few details about what you’re looking for and generate lender quotes. Compare interest, total repayable and more. Compare business loans and apply today.