How do you measure the impact of scaling vs growing your business?

measuring the impact of scaling vs. growing your business is essential to ensure that you are on the right track to long-term success. By evaluating your revenue growth, profit margins, customer acquisition cost, customer retention metrics, and employee productivity, you can make informed decisions about how to scale your business effectively. In addition to these metrics, it is important to consider the long-term impact on your business. Growing your business may be a viable short-term strategy, but it may not be sustainable over the long run. Scaling your business, on the other hand, allows you to create a strong foundation for continued growth and success.

With inflation being a hot topic at the moment I think the reality is failing to scale means big trouble. From the outset setting out a strategy to evolve your pricing over time is a must to ensure we can continue to protect our businesses. There are only three things we can do to enact change on our businesses. These are: increase prices, cut costs or sell more. So when it comes to scaling we need to find an innovation strategy to ensure we are always focusing on these key aspects. When we look for efficiency saving via things like AI or automation we’re aiming to innovate to work in a leaner and more efficient way. This will hopefully drive down costs and possibly enabling us to sell more.

After mastering proven and successful repeatability, then deploying scaling, provides efficient use of resources to grow business. The central issue is how to increase revenue, deriving from efficient capital use, while accounting for fixed and variable costs.

I have seen countless startups struggle with scaling their business. In addition to the challenges mentioned above,I would add that one of the biggest challenges of scaling is finding and retaining top talent. As your business grows, you'll need to hire more employees to keep up with demand. But finding qualified candidates who are also a good cultural fit can be difficult. Additionally,retaining top talent can be a challenge as competition for skilled workers intensifies. Another challenge is ensuring that you have sufficient capital to fund your growth. Scaling typically requires investment in new infrastructure, technology, and marketing, which can be expensive.Lastly, maintaining your company culture can also be a challenge as you grow.

Waste no time focusing on buying life back and expertise to shore up areas of weakness. Fractional hires in early stages will save you hefty salaries. Date them before you commit to anyone you’re unsure can swing it in the start up world.

I think that one of the main challenges of growing is that the leaders often become so fixated on growth. So much so that they end up weakening other parts of their business, just to grow. For example, they may hire more staff, but compromise on the quality and even on values. Then, what was once a smaller, profitable and well-respected business then becomes a large, messy business which puts profit over people every time. Of course, this doesn't happen all the time, but it's definitely something to be mindful of as the growth stage can be quite intense and addictive and bring out bad traits in people.