3 Ways To Scale-up Your Business

Setting up a business is a lot of hard work. But what is even more difficult is keeping your baby afloat. So what can you do to ensure that your startup stays on track?

Scaling up is the only sustainable way to ensure that you never run out of business. Are deep frowns creeping on your face? Ok. Let’s smoothen them.

The business world is highly volatile. No matter how hot your product or service is today, the next big wave of transition will wash it away. 

To combat this change, you need to open up your ROI channels and broaden your audience groups in the long run. This way, you will always have one product or the other that can safeguard your business boat. 

But achieving all this without support is sure to look like an impossible mountain to climb. 

Fear not. You’ve got help. 

At the heart of any successful venture standing the test of time is three core strategies. Let’s find out more. 

3 High-Performance Strategies to Scale Your Business

Scaling a business without a proper action plan is not only difficult but unmeasurable too. You need to have some set ground rules that can ensure you are on your way to achieve success with your business scaling goals.

But the big question here is, what are these metrics that can help you in this journey? 

Following are three core elements that are the foundation of all your business goals throughout your startup lifecycle. 

1. Anchor your action to goals 

Setting up a milestone for our business goals is critical for successfully crossing the business expectations. This means, no matter at what stage you are in, the seed or growth stage, scaling your business needs to start from having an overall vision. 

The best way to think of this step is like an annual milestone that you set up for your final destination. You can always divide your goals into short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals to be achieved over weeks, months, or a year. This will ensure you maintain speed while completing your activities. 

Once you have defined your goals for 12 months, it is action time. 

Take some time out and think about what minimum you need to do to achieve these goals? Is it hiring new employees, training the existing workforce, or rebranding that takes you one step ahead towards your goals? 

Remember, the idea here is to ensure that you get maximum mileage from minimum efforts. 

2. Business intelligence is the secret recipe to scaling

If you are thinking of traction, you cannot escape analysis at all. 

However, if you do so, be prepared to lose both your valuable resources, money, and time. Again a word of caution here. Only applying heavy analytics to your business will still not achieve your scaling dreams. You need to go that extra mile and figure out the elements that you want rich insights on. 

Following are three key areas that will always keep your analytics activity on point at all times. 

a. Target Market Analysis

Auditing the market you are trying to serve is critical to developing a strong forecast about the next big change. 

Understanding market behavior not only protects you from short-term losses but provides the opportunity for newer revenue channels. You must calculate your industry’s overall TAM, SAM, and SOM while you are at it. Remember, these metrics are as important as it was when you were first venturing in your startup. 

At any given point, if the TAM changes, your market and product potential get heavily influenced.

Be heavy on collecting quantitative data through surveys. You can use any channels like social media, telephone, individual surveys to get rich insights. 

Tools like SurveyMonkey and Survey Sparrow are beneficial in this task. 

b. Competitor Analysis

It’s essential to keep your friends close but even more important to keep your enemies closer. The same applies in the business world. You can benefit significantly from businesses that are complementary to your products and services.  But your competitors can help you learn more about customers. 

Infact, studying your competitors closely only improves your chances of standing out in front of your target customers. Remember, the best way to do so is by filling the gaps in the consumer needs. Instead of developing a better version of an existing product and colliding head-on with your competitors, create a landscape where you can promote each other’s business. Invest your resources to find out the gaps in the existing services. 

Tools like SEMRush and Quick Search can work wonders in this job. 

c. Customer Analytics

Getting a comprehensive understanding of your business landscape is incomplete if you fail to understand your customers’ wants. 

Sure, your competitors reveal a lot about the market but skipping customer analytics will be like relying on your best friend to know about your upcoming exam syllabus. 

Remember, competitor analysis is your secondary research, but customer analysis is your primary research. Both are important in their places. 

• What are your customer’s key pain points?
• How often do your customers face them?
• How much money and time does this problem cost your customers monthly? 
• What are the biggest frustrations your customers have with using your existing product?

These are a few vital questions you must while you are interviewing your customers? 

Tools like Google Analytics, Crazyegg can open doors to consumer behavior. 

3. Be heavy on growth-hacking tools 

The best way to scale your business is to understand the near-future and optimize your business resources to develop products to serve the future audience. But growth hacking is a loaded task, easier said than done. 

This means a heavy percentage of your future product successes are time-sensitive and dependent upon the proper context. No matter what your product does, launch speed is critical. 

Following are a few key areas where you can utilize growth hacking tools to keep up the pace. 

a. Business operations

Numerous activities go into the daily business process. Some are urgent and high value, while others are urgent but low value. Decluttering your workspace from low-value activities is critical for accelerated productivity and growth. Fortunately, you have multiple hands of help for automating your business workflows. 

SaaS-based workflow management and automation tools ensure overall efficiency and improve precision, accountability, and audibility in the long run. What’s more, now you have a lot more time to focus on what truly matters, your customers and products. 

Zapier is by far the market’s best-performing integration tool. You can notice a significant positive change in a matter of weeks. 

b. Knowledge Hub

Developing a winning product involves a lot of communication between stakeholders. Be it your product development team, marketing and sales team, or your end-users; people would be curious to know about your product more and more. 

Infact, there are high chances that there will be common frustrations about your product with your community. Answering them is both your responsibility and an opportunity to create a loyal fanbase. But the burning question here is how do you achieve this? 

Enter the knowledge hub. A knowledge hub is an internal wiki system that answers all the common questions about your product to each of your audience groups. This knowledge base system is a master database of information about your products. Ranging from training and educational guides to market and sales reports to product development technologies, you can create any document here. 

Pro Tip: Make sure your documents are illustrations heavy. It will improve your audience engagement by multiple folds.  There are numerous infographic templates that can help you in this task. 

c. Marketing and Sales

Marketing and sales are one of the core processes of your business any day. No matter if you are trying to find a product-market fit or gain a monopoly in your domain, staying connected to your customers is critical for your business success. But managing marketing and sales campaigns are a giant altogether.   

So how can you solve the problem? Enter marketing automation. The ideal marketing automation tools manifest the power of clear and contextual communication to foster meaningful relationships between you and your customers. 

d. Project management

The success of each of your products after the initial launch always passes through the filtration bed of reiteration based on the feedback you gain from your customers. This means if your project management system is not agile, it can cost you. To keep up the momentum, product development software like JIRA and Trello are invaluable.  

Conclusion

The journey of making a startup transform into a successful startup is not an overnight success. You need a combination of hard work, smart work, and patience. 

But what is truly going to ensure that you succeed in the long run is the connection you have with your customers. The stronger the connection, the better the success rate of your venture. 

Do you care about your customer? The more you understand your target audience’s lives, the better you will get at this. 

The above strategies are sure to show you a roadmap to simplify your journey. But the efficacy of the above methodologies depends upon quality execution. Pro-tip, to ensure you meet execution quality, always check your activity context and timing. 

Remember, business is about people. The better you get at understanding them, the better your business performs.