Every business grows with time and sooner or later the various stats like leads, sales, profits etc. starts to grow in numbers. But this growth takes time as organic and natural growth, without any specific and planned influence, happens in its own time.
On the other hand, when it comes to an exponential growth where your business goes to another level, mostly with VC funding or by some other rare factor, it starts to scale. This speed of growth, known as scaling might happen naturally someday, but if a business wants to achieve this by working on it, then we have compiled some tips to help scale your business.
Here, in this article, we will cover some tips to scale your business quickly:
1. Retain Existing Customers: The costs of getting a new customer is always very high and when you compare it to retaining a customer that you already have, the expense is next to nothing. This is the reason why a business should always focus on their churn rate.
To boost your customer retaining percentage, make sure to keep a good communication going with your customers. That way if anything goes wrong, your customer will immediately respond and you can quickly fix the issue. Along with that, keep your apps and sites in good health, update content information and keep improving your products.
2. Catch Leads: The easiest way to catch leads is from your own site and your content pages. If your blog is ranking organically then your own blog will be your best place to catch leads for free. Now compare these with the leads you catch from social media and elsewhere and you will realize that maintaining a blog is the best thing to do.
3. Check what is already working and do more: The best way to scale is to first analyze what is working today. Then, slowly start doing more of what is working and even spend more money in that direction to boost your revenue further.
4. Out Source: To speed things up, outsourcing is a great option, as it does not require employee trainings, office space etc. Simply hire the right talent, show them what to do and expected turnaround times and then wait for the work to be completed.
5. Plan on Paid Subscriptions: Scaling a subscription business is easy and safe. Even if the customer acquisition costs are high, you are still safe because they are on subscription. However, if your churn rate is too heavy then even a subscription model won’t last forever.
6. Research your Competition: You are not the only one in your niche or you aren’t the first person to do what you are already doing. In most cases, some form of competition already exists. Check how they scaled their business, how your niche was tapped and used. This research will become the key ingredient in your long-term business.
7. Look into Pay Per Click: If you have money to spend, your sale is on paid subscriptions and your cost of acquisition and churn rate is low then using PPC is going to benefit you heavily. Simply increase your budget, spend more money and at the end of it, gain more paid customers and keep scaling it.
8. Read books on Growth and Scaling: Not all ideas and knowledge can be found in the blogs and on YouTube. Think on it, the digital universe is fairly new, not even two decades old. However, people have been doing businesses for thousands of years and some of those business models have been documented for eons. All that knowledge and more are available in the books, waiting for them to be read.
9. Keep measuring new customer acquisition costs: It is important to keep a check on the money that is costing the business to acquire a new user. There is always more than one way to get the customers. Check which acquisition method is cheaper and yet scalable, organic, social media, pay per click etc. Push on the method that works best.
10. Balance your Debt and Equity: When the time comes to scale, most businesses start to think about taking in debt or giving away equity. Today, especially for startups, when they get funded, they take it that they had become successful. This is however only the start of a long journey.
In the long run, when you look back and see there isn’t a lot of equity left under your portfolio then you will realize that you haven’t done a good job with your money raising process. Similarly, if you raise too much debt and you find yourself in a position where working capital is difficult to get, then again you have made a mistake. The secret to success is somewhere in the balance, raise money as much as it is needed and spend it in ways that grows your business and brings back money.
11. Optimize your conversion rate: The final piece of this scaling process lies with the CRO, the more your conversion rate is optimized, the better sales you will get. Check your cart and if there are any tech issues then fix it. Sometimes, the buying process of a business is complicated and it takes a lot of hard work for their customers to reach to the payments page, if those issues are fixed, it will immediately speed up the sales.
There’s still a lot that can be done, for example sending discount offers when cart is abandoned. Working on lead magnets to catch emails and further boosting the conversion rates of email submission forms etc. Everything ultimately adds up and slowly keeps improving the CRO for long term benefits.
Scaling a business is difficult but given the right tools, budget and planning, it can be done in time. The technology too plays a huge role in helping scale various businesses. The best kept secrets of scaling a business is all in the process and planning.