How To Grow Your Small Business

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Melinda Emerson, MBA , better known as SmallBizLady.

Forbes magazine hailed Melinda as the #1 woman for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. For any of the small business leaders and budding entrepreneurs in my network, you won't want to miss this one!

Check out a snippet of our conversation below:

Are there some common mistakes that you think people make when scaling their business?

Definitely! I think first of all, where you get your financing to scale is extremely important. I have seen businesses get investors to scale and then the investors put them out of their businesses.

The problem with scaling is a lot of times people lose their culture because of all the new people and all the new money coming in and you have to protect the culture of your business at all costs. Because who you need to keep is your legacy employees who helped you get there and if the culture starts getting wonky those people are going to realise, “I can work anywhere, I don't have to work here”.

It is really really important that you as a person, before you start to scale your business think, do you have the skills to run a business that's bigger? Do you need to bring in an outside CEO to help you? Or do you need to invest in a coach to help you get to the leadership level that you need to get to?

But you need to first have a conversation with yourself, and say am I ready to drive a bigger bus? To borrow a phrase from the greatest rapper of all time, Biggie Smalls ‘mo money mo problems.’ So, I think you have to be prepared and even be able to anticipate some of the problems you're gonna have so that they don't make you wither and crumble up in your office wondering, why did I do this?

So I think it's important for you to look at the money, look at the team, look at the market. Where can you scale? Are you going to have to develop a new narrow niche to scale? Are you going to need to acquire another company to scale? There's a lot of ways to scale, so you have to question, do you need to inquire to have a consultant help you come in and think about the right strategy to scale your business.

Is it just a matter of hiring more salespeople and selling more stuff or is it more strategic than that? In most cases I believe it's more strategic than that, so I think you just need to figure out why you want to scale? are you ready to scale. And what skills you need to run a bigger business and if you start there, you're going to be okay.

?? Listen to the full episode here: https://spoti.fi/45Ras39