7 Key Principles for Scaling Your Business

Congratulations. You have succeeded in proving that your business is viable, and now it is time to put the pieces together to achieve steady growth.

If you scale too quickly, you can suffer from not being prepared. If you scale too slowly or unevenly, there are other consequences such as getting stuck with employees you hired that you don’t need anymore. Therefore, considerable thought should be given as you lay the foundation and strategic roadmap. Taking the time to define and work through the critical building blocks needed to scale will help immensely when it’s go-time.

1. Work On Your Business, Not In It

If you don’t focus on the key activities that move your business forward in a strategic way, you’re doomed to stagnate. This point can’t be overstated enough. Most struggling entrepreneurs I know fail because they focus on the wrong things. While work must get done inside the business, it’s the small, connected steps that get the climbers to the top of Mt. Everest.

One of the most valuable 30-minute segments I have personally spent in the past six months was when I sat down and evaluated all of my routine and 1-off work activities. I defined my high pay-off activities (“HPAs”) and went to work on delegating or eliminating the balance. It is vital to get clarity on the core activities you need to be laser-focused on as the leader and visionary, and then protect your boundaries around these actions.

2. Surround Yourself With ‘A’ Players

This one is straightforward. Businesses can only scale to the degree that they are full of the right people in the right seats at the right time. If a leader has to abandon their HPAs and consistently lean into an operational area because of organizational weakness, the business will not scale at the desired pace. As a reminder, it is much easier for ‘B’ and ‘C’ players to bring an ‘A’ player down than vice versa, so if you recognize an individual as a non-progressing ‘B’ player or ‘C’ player, remove them. Immediately.

3. Introduce Automation

Integrating automation across your business is a massive win regarding saving time (which means saving money) and enabling scalability.

Automation can cover repetitive processes as well as more complex processes such as marketing, sales, or payroll.

For example, rather than have an employee post every piece of content you create to social media in real-time, you can automate the process by taking advantage of software that schedules posts for you in advance.

4. Develop Effective Content and Build Your Sales Funnel

The essential requirement for any business is sales. And, if you can manage to create a useful sales funnel, the sky is the limit.

To perfect your sales funnel, consider its three stages:

Awareness

This phase is where you need to attract leads to your solutions. For example, creating a content marketing strategy is an effective way to do so. This strategy might include generating content such as white papers, ebooks, and how-to videos that are relevant to your business’ offering and attractive to your target audience.

Consideration

The consideration phase is the one in which prospective clients compare and contrast products and solutions as they inch towards making a purchase decision. Marketing material in this phase should include webinars, case studies, and client testimonials geared toward equipping the prospective client to make an informed and confident decision.

Decision

The decision phase is where a prospective client finally decides whether they will purchase from you. In this phase, your business has the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell products to them or send them incentives that will encourage them to establish a long-term relationship with your company.

Every phase of your funnel must be well thought out, tested, and retested to determine what works and what doesn’t. Once optimized, you can effectively put the funnel “on auto-pilot” and focus your efforts on scaling your business.

5. Establish Key Relationships And Partnerships

The adage of “who you know” being more important than “what you know” is relevant when it comes to scaling businesses. Please don’t misunderstand me – you certainly need to know your stuff and be stellar in your area of core competency. That is critical to your clients’ success. However, in the end, much of your scalability potential comes down to your connections and partnerships.

Yes, we know warm referrals are better than cold leads in business development efforts. However, it goes beyond this. Strategic partnerships can also provide the non-core functional areas of your business operations. They can allow you the ‘just-in-time’ bandwidth needed to boost your ability to focus and balance your operations during upswings and downswings.

As an example, say you need marketing personnel in three key competency areas. However, you need 1/3 of a resource in each and finding a unicorn with all three will take time and potentially fail. Do you hire three individuals in this situation, each of which is bound to be underutilized – or do you partner with a firm that can provide the outsourced expertise in all three? A few months later, you may need 2/3 of a resource in each and the firm can quickly adjust to this increased fractional employee demand.

6. Establish A Public Profile

Steve Jobs or Apple — which has the more significant imprint on your brain? Even if your answer is Apple, it’s a close call. Jobs was excellent at creating a bigger than life public profile. If you are looking to scale your business, you need to take a lesson. The world is no longer a B2B or B2C world, it is a people-to-people (P2P) world and as the leader of your company, other people (i.e., clients, investors, advisors, strategic partners) want to know you.

7. Think Big and Act Boldly

As Steven Covey says, “begin with the end in mind.” Have a crystal clear vision of where you are going and communicate this to your team over and over.Stretch their thinking and show them what is in it for them. Then, follow up by taking massive action. Don’t be timid. Go big and go bold. There are many times when fear will hit while you’re in the midst of scaling. As my good friend, Garrett Gravesen, says in his book 10 Seconds of Insane Courage, “Fear will tell you ‘Play it safe. Hang on to what you’ve got,’ but Courage responds, ‘Let go. Life happens outside your comfort zone.’”

Scaling isn’t a smooth process. However, done right, it can be incredibly rewarding. While there are many more building blocks that could have been included here such as financing, strategy, etc., my experience has shown that mastery of these seven key principles will move the needle and help drive your vision to reality.