How To Make Your Startup Scalable
How can you make your startup scalable? Several things hinder the growth options for small businesses yet scalability is a top priority for businesses set to withstand longevity in this modern age of technology.
These are some measures to take to ensure a scalability potential for your business.
- Be consistent
if you want your business to grow and be successful, you need to do one thing that most successful businesses have in common: Consistency. A consistent business helps to identify market opportunities that are potential for business growth.
- Identify and acquire the right customer
Essentially, making sure that you pick and identify the right target market for your business in order to ensure business scalability. You need to get all the information on who your customers are, where they are and what they really need.
- Standardize your products and services
In the beginning, because of insufficient funds or resources, small businesses might tend not to provide standard products/services. However, without a quality output, the noise, fame, and opportunities that were readily available for the business will no longer be in place thus hindering a brand’s ability to be scalable.
- Build a business plan and model that is attractive to investors.
Too many business plans are really product plans for customers, touting free services and long feature lists. It’s hard to build and scale a business on free high-support products. Scalable businesses have high margins (over 50%), low support, and minimum staffs.
- Build a strong team to take yourself out of the critical path.
Stop spending your time working in your business and instead work on your business. If you want to scale your business, show that you have and can continue to hire the right people to run the scaled business without you being everywhere and making every decision. Work on transferable skills to transfer to your team members.
- Focus on marketing and indirect channels to get the message out quickly.
Direct marketing is generally not scalable, especially on low-cost high-volume products. These days, heavy marketing is always required to make your startup visible and scalable amid the flood of information from all sources to all customers. Word-of-mouth does not scale.
Ninety percent of small businesses today are family businesses, which can be very successful, satisfying, and small by design. Getting your business ready for scalability is a strategic decision. If your passion is to change the world, or even dominate an industry, scalability is the only way to multiply your arms and legs, and the hours in your day. The question now to ask is, “Are you feeling the need yet in your own startup?”.
