How to Scale a Growing Business (Using Technology to Your Advantage)

If you could generate more revenue without spending more, wouldn’t you?

If you share most people's goals and aspirations, the answer is a resounding and enthusiastic “yes.” Scaling a business is an important element of continued success—provided it is carried out correctly. Let’s discuss how you can help ensure your success, partly by implementing the right technology.

What Can Disrupt a Business’ Efforts to Scale?

As we said, most businesses would jump at the chance to increase their efficiency to the point where revenue growth far outpaces that of their efforts. However, that enthusiasm can lead to unfortunate missteps and mistakes. Whether these businesses try to scale too quickly, shirk the systems they have in place, or overwhelmingly pay attention to short-term objectives and lose focus on the big picture, there are numerous ways for such efforts to go awry.

This makes it essential that your own efforts are designed to succeed.

How to Scale Your Business with Success in Mind

Go in With a Strategy

As with any business initiative, having a clear and thought-out plan from the very beginning will help make your efforts far easier and more successful. What can you do to increase your sales without simply throwing more money at the problem? Refining your efforts by answering this question and adhering to some additional best practices…

• Considering both your customers’ behavior and the feedback they give you
• Identifying your targets and shaping your message to more precisely address their needs
• Creating and executing a marketing plan
• Utilizing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution
• Assembling a sales team that understands your business’ value proposition

…allows you to maximize your current and prospective relationships and boost your profits appropriately.

Improve Upon Your Team’s Skills

Whether you focus on training your staff or seeking out employees with these capabilities already developed, it is important that your team is ready to serve your customers based on their needs. What skills will be required of your team to fulfill the demands of your clientele? Which skills will be most helpful in your pursuit of your own business goals?

The more capable your team is, the easier it will be for you to expand upon your business’ offering. Many hands make for light work, after all. Fortunately, many platforms are available to help businesses cultivate their internal skills through training and evaluation. 

Embrace Flexibility

Regardless of your industry, things are going to change as time passes. Some changes will be gradual, some rapid, some will last, and some will be just a flash in the pan before conditions revert to the norm. To some degree, it isn’t these changes that really matter to you… it’s more about their influence on your market and customer base.

A successful business can respond to these shifts with poise, pivoting to incorporate these changes into its operations and predicting which changes will have long-term ramifications on its operations. Keeping close observation of your market is critical to enacting this kind of strategy, and tools like the aforementioned customer relationship management systems will be extremely helpful in tracking these patterns. Collaboration solutions will also be key, as an entire team needs to be involved if any pivots are being made.

A Growing Business Will Have Growing Technology Needs… That’s Where We Come In

At the beginning of this discussion, we submitted a specific scenario—increasing revenue without increasing costs. So far, we’ve primarily focused on the “increasing revenue” part of that statement, but what about the “without increasing costs” bit?

Truth is, there are very few means of scaling up a business without incurring additional costs. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. Upscaling will almost always require some resources to be spent, and because resources are inherently scarce, there will be an unavoidable cost to some degree. 

With this in mind, we can adjust the scenario to be more realistic to what a business can actually achieve. As such, optimizing this ratio regarding your business' received value is much more important: how can you see maximum revenue increases with minimal additional investments made?

Managed IT Services Can Help Businesses Prioritize Value

While we make this claim with an inherent bias (of course, a managed service provider would recommend managed IT services), the facts are what they are. The managed service model is founded upon maximizing value, and part of that is being scalable by design.

Forming a relationship with an MSP gives you access to precisely the level of IT services you require, with a team working in the background to proactively catch and resolve as many threats and issues as possible. This means that you not only receive the value of having a team of technology professionals at your disposal, but you also see the impact of many issues being converted into a non-issue. All this comes in exchange for a scalable, consistent, and predictable monthly investment, helping you stretch your budget further and make changes far more easily.

We’d love to discuss how we can start working with you as you pursue your goals. Give us a call at (605) 644-7360 to get started.