You’ve poured your heart, sweat, and tears into your home-based business and it has finally taken off. You are seeing good ROI and your customers aren’t complaining. It may now be time to scale your business, but what does this mean? While there are multiple definitions of scaling, the most important one in this case is to grow your business and revenue, while still keeping your costs lean. Scaling your business should be done once you’ve already perfected your business model, so you can focus your energy on growth and not product development or user experience. Scaling your business can be tough, but it is doable, with these actionable tips.
1. Build your public profile
With a solid product to promote, building your public profile can only help you gain more leads and customers. Brand recognition is one of the most important factors in a consumer’s decision to make a purchase. If your target audience is clueless about who you are, they are going to choose the other brands every single time. In the digital age, building your public profile can be super cheap and super easy, but it takes some know-how.
Start by developing your brand message and strategizing how you will deliver this message in a consistent and unified way across all your marketing channels. What will your audience respect you the most for? What value can you deliver to them? What message do you want to send?
Next, you’ll want to choose what channels are really the most beneficial to your brand and in getting your message out. Regular, brand-optimized content is one of the best ways to promote your business and build your public profile. Starting with your website, reaching down to your blog, and extending outward to your social media, your content should tell your audience who your brand is, what it’s all about and why they should buy your products and services.
But it doesn’t stop there. Consumers don’t want to be sold to. They want to learn about your brand and trust your business as a solution to a problem. Rather than having a promotional theme in your content, you should be positioning yourself as a thought leader in the industry. By giving your audience value in the form of ideas, tips, and other thought knowledge, they’ll automatically associate you with being an expert in the field and considering your product won’t be an afterthought.
2. Get to know people
As an entrepreneur, you know that you’ll have to shake a few (thousand) hands in the process of scaling and building your business. Just as you will when you build your public profile, getting to know people will ensure you are more easily recognized, which can mean more leads and sales for your business.
LinkedIn is a social media platform that professionals use to not only promote themselves and their businesses, but to find other businesses to partner with and allow for some great connections. Search for others in your industry, as well as influencers in the field. While you may look at these connections as competition, there is quite a bit you can learn from those who have already succeeded in scaling their own businesses. Part of scaling your business might include doing something more efficiently and for less money, and by meeting others, you might just find those solutions that you would never have thought of.
3. Do less yourself
Many entrepreneurs spend 80-hour weeks getting their businesses off the ground. The thought here is that the more you do and don’t have to pay someone to do, the better your profit margin will be. Put simply, this is a total myth. How sustainable can your business be with your putting in work weeks where you get no rest, no play, and no time to be creative? All those little tasks that really aren’t efficient for you to be doing, like bookkeeping, content writing, or even customer reach-out, would be better done by experts in the field. While you may have to put up some of your budget to pay for professionals in those fields, the returns will be astounding.
By letting you have more time to think and do what it is you do well – like coming up with great ideas! – your business will grow exponentially. As well, by letting the experts take on those tasks, the work will be done more efficiently and expertly, which could also mean a better ROI. For example, by hiring expert content writers who are skilled not only in writing, but also SEO and possibly even your industry, you’ll drive more traffic to your website and your marketing channels. Most likely, you didn’t start your business because you were an SEO expert, so you are best leaving the heavy lifting to someone more qualified. Your investment here will pay off.
4. Focus on what you’re doing wrong
Inevitably, there are going to be things in your business that just aren’t working. I mean, we can’t all be perfect! The best way to figure out what’s working and what’s not is to gather some data. You probably already track your sales, leads, and return on investment, but do you have numbers on your traffic, reach, and engagement on your social channels? When you send out an email campaign are you keeping a close watch on who is opening the emails and who is clicking? Are you making changes based on this data?
By focusing on what you are doing wrong, rather than what you are doing right, you can learn some incredibly valuable lessons.
5. Increase your skill set
Once your business has started running itself, you can focus on new ventures or expansion of your current business. A true entrepreneur is always learning and growing. By increasing your skill set, whether in your industry or out, you’ll have expert knowledge that you can bring back to your business. Scaling your business won’t be difficult if you have new skills that translate to new opportunities. The possibilities are truly endless here.
Let’s say you are a kick-ass salesperson, with a savvy for tech, but your project management skills lack. Of course, you can hire project managers, but by honing your own PM skills, you’ll be better at what you do, take less time to do it, and find ways that your team can be more efficient as well.
On the other hand, you could be a creative type, who is always able to come up with new and fabulous ideas on the fly, but you couldn’t hook up your Wi-Fi to save your life. Technology is not going away, so it is going to pay off to learn new software, especially ones related to your industry.
Entrepreneurs looking to scale their business should spend some time thinking more about themselves. By asking the question, “What can I do to grow myself?”, you’ll get the answers you need to scale.
