10 Tips On How To Scale Your Startup

Almost every entrepreneur dreams of growing his startup into a billion-dollar business. With that achievement comes a feeling of fulfillment for many founders. However, as with everything worth achieving, this is not an easy goal. There are many things that can go wrong even when the project has the potential and a huge demand from its target market. That is why I tried to put a simple list of tips on how to scale your company from something very small all the way to Unicorn status.

1) Check up on your startup’s scalability —?For a startup to be scalable, it has to have passed through several milestones like building a minimum viable product, acquiring core customers, and strategic partners, and setting up stable processes. That being said, the first step to scaling the company is to evaluate its scalability. This is done by answering several important questions:

• What do you need to grow and why? There are several ways to?scale a startup , but the most common are people, products, and technology. You have to determine which ones you will have to work on obtaining.
• Do you need more people for that and what will be their task??Scaling in terms of adding more employees doesn’t necessarily mean hiring full-time staff. You can use the services of the many freelancers out there.
• What do we need to take out??For your startup growth to be efficient, you will need to make the company lean and mean. This happens by cutting out parts that are non-productive and wasteful.
• Do we have the required resources??If you do not have them, then it is time to look for external ones like crowdfunding, venture capital, or angel investments. It is of extreme importance to decide which one is for you because each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
• What will happen if things do not go as planned??When you reach the point where you need to scale, you will also have to start thinking about an exit strategy. Why so early, you would ask? Because investors will require a well-thought-out plan on how they will get their money multiplied. They will also want a strategy on what the company will do if it fails to deliver its promises.

Mapping out ways to address various problems before they even arise will certainly save you a lot of headaches.

A startup that has the potential to scale usually builds its offer on the basis of an innovative idea and works on a scalable and repeatable business model that has the promise to turn it into a high-growth, profitable company. It does that by entering a large market and taking a share away from incumbents or by creating a new market and growing it rapidly. Such startups usually need the so-called venture or “risk” capital to generate market demand and grow exponentially.

2) Set a timeline for the most important goals?— You will need several things to scale your project. The first one is to hire a great team so you can delegate properly. You’ll never be able to scale if you have to take care of everything by yourself. Second, do not waste your time on unimportant tasks. Try not to spend days deciding on features like the type of font for your slogan. Focus on acquiring more and bigger customers.

The third most important thing is to set deadlines. Often startups run out of cash before reaching milestones and that results in their untimely demise. In order to avoid that try to squeeze in every working hour that you have at your disposal to stabilize your company. We cannot stress that enough. Our experience shows that startup graveyards are full of projects which depleted their money stacks long before generating enough traction to raise their next funding rounds.

3) Solve your customers’ problems quickly and efficiently —?Your solution should offer complete satisfaction to your customers and solve their immediate needs. If it manages to do that for your first ones, then they can become your brand’s ambassadors and quickly spread the word. Once this happens it is only a matter of time and good management for your client base to grow in an exponential manner.

4) Identify your core product, team, and customers —?Defining what defines you is the key to building an amazing brand and every scalable company should strive to have a strong core. What do we mean by that? The core of the business is its heart and soul. Without it, the organization cannot function properly and often dies soon after its inception. You can have many products or services in addition to your main ones, but every business is usually famous for one or two things. Apple for its iPhone and MacBook, Google for its Search Engine, Microsoft for its Operating System, and so on. But how to define your core business? Here are several questions that can help you outline it:

• What am I offering and what are my strongest sides??Answering this basically gets you back to how everything started and how the idea of the company was born. By offering a product or service in which you have invested enough time to make it great, you are getting yourself much ahead of your competitors.
• How am I different from other similar companies??This could be a particularly hard question since a first glimpse of your organization could be almost the same as the other market players (even though most companies will not admit that). However, it is worth noting that adding a personal touch to the project (even if it seems rather insignificant now) can really make a difference in the long-term market perception.
• Who is my ideal customer??One of the best ways to get your first customers is by defining the perfect one for you. This is done via the so-called target persona — essentially an imaginary person in which all the traits of the ideal client are concentrated. Creating such an image will help your company focus on streamlining its activities in order to satisfy the needs of its target market.

5) Outsource or automate?— In order for your business to become profitable it has to be efficient. In order to be efficient it has to lower the costs of its operations. That can be done by outsourcing its non-key functions. Here are some areas where this can prove essential:

• Customer support?— Once you start gathering customers en masse, you will find that it becomes extremely hard and expensive to provide 24/7/365 support to them without draining your company’s resources. As you expand your operations, one of the first things that you should do is to hire an external company to serve your existing clients’ needs.
• Lead generation?— This area often takes a large amount of energy and time from the entrepreneurs to master. Perhaps it could even be accounted as one of the hardest parts of running a business. It is one of the main reasons why so many startups fail to generate enough revenue to raise their next round of funding. Sales departments require a constant supply of leads in order to reach such goals and it is in the best interests of the organization to automate that by hiring an outside party to do that for them.
• Content marketing?— It can take a lot of time to figure out the right approach when it comes to creating the best content for your audience. Instead of bumping your head regarding what type of videos and articles you should make, try to delegate that to an external marketing agency or a freelancer that knows their craft well.
• Financial analysis and forecasts?— Another time-consuming area that does not require your immediate and constant attention. Small businesses usually use the services of local accountants and bankers in order to keep track of their financials. Startups targeting a large market should try to do the very same thing by using the services of a highly skilled financial specialist.
• Inventorization?— Few things are as annoying for a tech entrepreneur as trying to keep up with the inventory and its supply. Automating that as soon as possible can bring the founding team’s attention to their main role — improving the quality of their offer and satisfying their customers’ needs in the best way possible.
• Conversion rates optimization?— Most of the people who will go through your content will not become customers. However, that should not stop you from trying to increase that rate constantly. That could be done via better content marketing, sales funnel, and by becoming an influencer in your own industry. Not an easy feat though since it may require a lot of experimentation and guesswork until figuring out the right mixture of tactics to do that. In order to avoid that, it may be better for you and your organization to outsource that to an external expert.
• Income stream automation?— Running several projects simultaneously can be a huge headache to every founder. Wearing various hats can be tiring so automating the income generation processes can help you ease the burden of having to manage each one of them (revenue from website ads for example).

6) Network with successful scalers —?Entrepreneurs who have done it and have managed to multiply their revenue by a two-digit number are the perfect teachers for you and your team. Try to network with them and learn from their mistakes. Some of those successful entrepreneurs may become your angel investors and can be intimately involved in your endeavor. This can prove invaluable to the scaling efforts of your company since those individuals can bring a huge amount of experience and a large network to the table.

7) Build a great company culture —?Culture binds the team together and it essentially represents how the employees treat each and the company’s customers. It is based on the very values that were ingrained in your mission from the very beginning of the enterprise.

8) Get the public’s attention?— To scale up properly, you will need good marketing. Some brands have managed to use viral marketing strategies to leave a stamp in their audience’s minds. Using social media in an innovative way can provide extremely useful results.

9) Set up efficient and effective processes —?The best-organized big cities around the world had the layout of their core road network already set up at the beginning of their construction. Smart urban planners know that this is important for the stable growth and development of the town. The same principle holds up for business development.

Many startup founders run into trouble keeping up with the growth of the company just because of the lack of a set of rules and principles to guide them in their day-to-day operations. As the organization expands, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage it using only intuition and informal rules. That is why you need to map your activities. Here are a few tips from us to help set that up:

• Review your workflow and agree on best practices
• Document your every step
• Train your employees
• Simplify the processes and cut out unnecessary steps
• Automate them as much as you can

10) Make your business independent from your management —?If the work is done well enough, the company will not need your help in its operational tasks. Your focus should be on the strategic side of the management. As you grow, strive to evaluate the areas where your oversight is no longer needed and delegate it to promising managers. Hire leaders with great potential and trust them to do the job properly.

Summary

Trying to scale without good preparation can do more harm than good in the long run. Many companies have failed this way just because their leadership has been blind to the risks and challenges that this undertaking poses. Do not let yourself be one of them. Prepare a checklist that will guide you through your preparation and follow it strictly. Try to be as detailed as possible because that will ensure the smooth growth of the company. As we mentioned mapping out ways on how things can go south is half the battle. After you and your team are sure that the scaling checklist is covered, you are ready to grow and become a company that will get the whole world talking.

Post by Lachezar Zanev (Luke), Ambassador at TiE SoCal Angels

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Post by?Lachezar Zanev ?(Luke), Ambassador at?TiE SoCal Angels