Signs You’re Ready To Scale
“How do I scale my business?” is a question on many entrepreneurs’ minds, but there’s a lot more to scaling your business than most entrepreneurs realize.
It’s not just about whether your business is growing and successful. It’s also about whether your business has all the pieces in place to scale without collapsing.
In this episode, James and Dean share some telltale signs your business is ready to scale. They also reveal how to avoid the many potential pitfalls of trying to scale before you’re ready, and what being “ready” to scale actually means. (It’s not what most people think.)
Outline of This Episode
- 6:30 What does it actually mean to scale?
- 10:15 Growth and scaling are not the same thing
- 16:25 You’ve got a winner – what’s next?
- 21:01 Find out what breaks
- 25:02 Get your ducks in a row FIRST
- 30:55 Scaling for the first time in a new business or industry
- 33:59 The most dangerous traffic source
Growing is not the same as scaling
The word growing is often used interchangeably with scaling, but they aren’t the same thing. Growth is about getting traction in your business, creating predictable results from your sales, marketing, delivery, operations, and finances, and creating the infrastructure your business needs to be able to scale. Scaling is about adding more volume to what’s already there. Some overlap is expected, but don’t make the mistake of confusing growth with scaling.
Success doesn’t mean you’re ready to scale
Another mistake many entrepreneurs make is thinking that because their business is successful, it’s ready to scale, but there’s a lot more to being ready to scale than being successful. Scaling even a successful business without the right infrastructure in place is like putting up the walls of a house with no foundation under them. It’s only a matter of time before everything comes crashing down. Tune into the episode to hear how to identify which areas of your business still need that infrastructure before you’re ready to scale.
Find the breaking points
Odds are excellent that if you tried to scale right now, some parts of your business would “break” because they’re not structured in a way that supports scaling. Before you try to scale, identify the breaking points, and a way to fix them. For example, if you’re getting 100 orders a day now, and want to scale to 500 orders a day, could you keep up with inventory and delivery, or would something break? If you’re a service-based business, do you have enough support and systems in place to serve all the people who want to work with you? These are the questions that have to be addressed BEFORE you try to scale.
Beware scaling with one traffic source
In light of the war between Apple and Facebook over who gets access to what data, along with other changes Facebook has made, business owners who depend on Facebook ads as their only source of traffic are experiencing rising ad costs and lower profit margins. The Google “slap” from years ago also illustrates the danger of depending on one traffic source. As you look to scale your business, make sure your plan includes additional sources of traffic.
Simplicity equals scalability
The simpler you structure every facet of your business, the easier it will be to scale. Look for ways you can make things simpler instead of more complicated. What that looks like for your business depends entirely on what you do and where you’re at. It could be you need more software, or it could mean you need LESS software. It could mean you need another team member, or it could mean you have too many because you’ve overcomplicated the way your business is set up. Look for ways you can simplify.
Resources & People Mentioned
Music for “Just The Tips” is titled, “Happy Happy Game Show” by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
