Scaling your small business or start-up

If you are a start-up or small business and are torn between expanding your customer base versus limited capacity for growth, this article may be of use. If you are thinking of starting up, this should hopefully give you some great insights too.

Our recent client, as with others, has a customer base that requires an “I need it now and I need it done well” type of service. Managing a business by yourself with demanding clientele is very stressful, as is thinking about hiring employees to accommodate larger volumes. We have implemented various strategies that came from our Initial Assessment that have made my client's business not only more profitable, but easier to manage and now he spends more time doing what he set out to do when setting up his business. We believe the below tips to be very important when growing your business so do check them out and please feel welcome to contact us if you feel we could help.

Your Business – For small businesses, setting up your processes in a streamlined fashion is important but is often overlooked, due to the more dominant stresses of running the day to day tasks. Think of making popcorn…before it pops, the seed has an uneven anatomy and therefore when it does pop, the process is completely random and uncontrollable in how it expands. Your operations need to be streamlined and well shaped, so when your business “pops,” it expands in a predictable fashion and you know you are employing capital efficiently. Do you regularly step back and take an objective view of your business processes and their efficiency? To help our client, we have written procedures, adapted their processes and organised them into lean functions within the business structure.

Time – If you know that your business niche is something your clients want to pay for (though the following may not work for every business), have you considered whether there is part of the process that someone else can do for you? Think of a painter who does bespoke patterns for walls in your home and he spends half a day painting all the walls white before he can begin the bespoke service. What if that person could have somebody else paint the walls white whilst they focus on completing another wall? It sounds like a simple outsourcing analogy, but it works and a lot of small businesses are unsure how to take advantage of this opportunity and it is limiting the scalability of their unique service (the money maker). For our client, we implemented a safe and controlled process that allows them to start with a 50% completed canvas of work without compromising quality. Our client can comfortably take on larger volumes of work making the business more profitable and has very happy customers since they spend more time focusing on higher quality work.

Cost – On a day to day, all businesses are trying to keep costs low but how can you proactively know your efforts will be effective? We helped our client think about realistic and quantifiable ways to keep costs low.

-         Cost and Time Benefit Analysis: We analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your business alternatives, with a strong consideration around Cost and Time. It is like a SWOT analysis, but with a specific focus around creating cost efficiencies in your business and freeing time for you. It is pivotal that as you expand the business, you carefully consider cost and time employed versus profitability.

-         Umbrella employment: Small businesses or start-ups often do not have the funds to separately employ professionals to work on website design, branding, marketing, social media / video editing and operations management, which is why we offer these in a bespoke package, tailored to your needs. This could be cost effective for you, without losing the experience your business needs and could be the difference in implementing your business goals to a high standard.

-         Unitisation: Do you know the cost of each process and profit your business takes per unit? If not, we can unitise how much it costs to run each segment of your operation, so when it comes to scaling you have the transparency you require to make the most profitable decision.

An in depth analysis of your business processes, costs and time could shape the way you consider setting short and long term growth plans and I would recommend always considering them together when making decisions to grow your business.

Thanks for reading,