Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to scale. If you aren’t sure what that means, according to Fundable, here are the differences between growing your company and scaling your business:
“Growing means you are adding resources at the same rate that you’re adding revenue. This model occurs constantly in professional services business models — they gain a client, hire more people to service the client, and add revenue at the same exact rate at which they’ve added more costs. While they’ve technically “grown,” they haven’t scaled.
On the other hand, scaling is about adding revenue at an exponential rate while only adding resources at an incremental rate. Google has clearly demonstrated this concept by adding customers at a quick pace while adding very few additional resources to service those customers. That’s why they were able to increase their margin at a rapid rate in just a few short years.”
Basically, as a small business owner, you want to scale your business: adding revenue without needing to necessarily hire additional people or get more paid software subscriptions, etc.
One way to scale your business is simply to raise your prices. You add to the overall revenue, but not to your workload.
Another way is to create additional offerings. For example, if I were only writing, I may add editing services to my business. Or maybe I do both, but I decide to start marketing those services to college and graduate students, to help edit term papers. I would be expanding on my offerings, but not necessarily needing to grow my company in size.
You can add value to current offerings. You may choose to have a more customized experience, or start putting out free newsletters or content marketing with deeper information and value to your current clients.
Another way to scale is to automate as much as possible. Instead of sending a thank you or welcome email to every new inquiry or client individually by copying and pasting the email and the email address in and hitting send and recording it in your spreadsheet, an automated system for doing the same thing will save you time and allow you to focus on other parts of your business.
You can also streamline your pricing. When trying to scale your business, simplicity is key. You want easy-to-understand pricing models. You can’t be creating pricing on a case-by-case basis, or having so many different pricing packages that people get bored or frustrated getting through them to find what they need. Streamlining your prices and what you offer for what price makes it easier for a potential client to see and choose what they want, and say yes!
What has been your biggest challenge in scaling your business? Have you found it difficult to streamline and make things more efficient, or is it easier than you expected? What advice would you give other entrepreneurs who are trying to scale their small business?
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Originally published at medium.com