Small Business Development: Ideas to Help You Scale Up

Guide your business to the next level

Starting your own small business remains one of the most daunting but exciting career moves for any entrepreneur. Having decided on your industry, the type of service you’re providing, or an innovative product you’re bringing to market, there’s nothing as liberating as seeing your ideas brought to life and your small business development truly take flight.

Even better is realizing that it could be time to scale up. You’ve laid the foundations and navigated the major stumbling blocks that come with the early stages of getting your business up and running, and now you’re ready for the next step. There are several reasons that you may consider scaling up your small business:

• You find yourself turning down business opportunities. Too few employees or not enough time could mean it’s time to scale up.
• Cash flow is secure and sales are repeatable. If forecasting for months or years ahead looks positive based on your historical trajectory, it could indicate a strong customer base and the opportunity for expansion.
• Your business concept is proven and your staff functions smoothly. If you’ve proved that your business works, solves a very real problem, and there has been a steady demand for your product, you’re on solid ground. Employees who understand their roles and aren’t constantly putting out fires bode well, too.

Now that you’ve decided to bump up your small business development plans, it’s time to look at a few ideas for how to do it.

Simplify your communication needs with SMS

Your small business can’t grow if it is being hampered by clunky processes. As you scale, you’ll need to streamline communication internally and with your expanding customer base. Bulk SMS messaging offers this capability, as anyone with their mobile phone on them can be kept up to date with developments (and let’s be honest — who doesn’t have their mobile phone on them virtually all of the time?).

Whether you’re sending out updates to staff in different regions or offices, or communicating with customers at various points in their purchasing journey, you can benefit from the almost perfect 98 percent open rate of SMS.

Best of all? Using an SMS Platform like the one offered by Clickatell makes it easy to scale up over time.

Related: How Small Businesses Can Use SMS for Improved Customer Loyalty

Small business development needs automation

There are many reasons to include automation as part of your small business development plans, and all of them will impact the speed at which you can scale up.

Manual processes simply take longer, which is fine if you have just a few customers. But as you continue growing, tasks such as processing payroll begin to take up an unreasonable amount of time.

Or, without an effective chatbot or live chat tool in place, your employees are unable to handle the volume of online customer queries and will be distracted as they attempt to multitask. One study indicates that 40% of productivity is lost to task-switching, which automation can help prevent.

Ideally, you want to automate before you scale up. The upsides? Accessing data, marketing new products, and remunerating employees will all become straightforward tasks.

Give your marketing efforts a boost

Nobody is going to know about your business’s growth if you don’t tell them about it.

It’s important to communicate your expansion in compelling and sensible ways, remembering that the type of marketing you choose should be able to scale up too.

For instance, while direct marketing can’t be considered scalable, content marketing can. Be sure to make it clear to your customers how they can reach you too. For instance, your smart chatbot can only help customers if they know it exists.

Strengthen your personal profile and hone your focus

As the leader of a growing business, it’s important to acknowledge the increasingly personalized, people-focused world that demands transparency. Your customers want to know who you are and what you’re about, so ensure that you’re projecting a confident and visible digital and public profile.

Added to that, don’t fall into the trap of getting too involved in the smaller, time-consuming, daily tasks. As the business owner, make it your mission to focus on the actions, present and future, that will grow your business strategically.

Getting to the point where you’re in a position to scale up your small business is an achievement of its own. Once you’ve decided that scaling up is an option for you, these strategies can help you guarantee healthy growth that is sustainable and manageable.

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