It’s a great feeling to dream about scaling your new business. It gets even better when you’re able to move forward with a plan to make it happen. Here’s what we recommend to make sure your operations keep pace with your aspirations.
Greater Awareness, Clearer Strategy
When you understand what scaling your business entails, and the mindset you need to do it well, you can develop a clear, focused strategy for achieving your goals without stretching beyond your limits.
“Growing your business” means you’re increasing revenue and increasing resources. You take on more clients, therefore you need more people, tools, time, etc. Scaling happens when you increase revenue faster than the associated costs.
Scaling effectively requires a strong foundation of systems, structure, and processes that allow you to take on more work (and generate more revenue) without an outsized increase in expenses.
Questions that help business owners get into a scaling mindset include:
- How can I take on more clients without adding another person to my team full-time?
- How can I better use tools and systems so my team can do more of what they’re best at?
- When I am ready to grow, how can I continue scaling my business?
Scaling will always involve some risk, but that risk becomes a lot more manageable when you know you’re ready to scale. I look for three key indicators:
- Documented Processes: Procedures for your current business operations are essential, including day-to-day operations, employee onboarding, client onboarding, delivery processes, etc. They allow for an accurate understanding of your operational starting point(s).
- Clear Boundaries: You need a very clear understanding of what you’re offering and what you’re not when it comes to products, services, and your scope of work.
- Accurate Financials: Accurate budgeting is key to avoiding unnecessary waste when
Systems & Operations: Tools You Can Use
Technology can be an effective bridge to your goals when scaling your new business. There are lots of great software and systems to complement the creative, talented people helping you streamline your operations. Here are some to prioritize:
- Project Management Software: Track tasks and deadlines.
- Standard Operating Procedures: Document what you do, who does it, and how they do it.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Manage clients and leads.
- Bookkeeping Systems: Automate as much of your financials/budgeting as possible.
- Onboarding Software: Bring clients and team members into your organization smoothly.deciding how and where to scale your business.
Financial and Team Readiness: What to Consider
Generally, a new business is financially ready to scale when there’s positive cash flow, and some cash reserves. It’s ideal to have predictable revenue in the recent past and for the foreseeable future. For an extra layer of assurance, look at the cost of hiring someone permanently/full-time for the role/area you want to scale in. Does that cost outweigh the cost of the tools and processes you’re planning to scale with? If so, scaling is a wise move. If not, it may be worth considering growth in that area, and continue scaling in others.
Just because it’s not cost effective to hire full time doesn’t mean talented people aren’t crucial to helping you scale. Scaling includes strategically hiring and outsourcing in key areas, like administrative roles, operations support, project management, or sales/marketing roles.
For example, a new business needed help with onboarding. So we helped them develop a system for client and team onboarding, then hired the project management support to make it happen. They can now take on about 30% more projects than they could before without hiring 30% more people.
When deciding who to bring in, consider how you can most effectively leverage everyone’s strongest skills. Remember: your admin/office manager is NOT your operations manager. Take the time to align skills to roles correctly for best long-term results.
Avoid Scaling Mistakes & Bottlenecks
One of the most common mistakes we see business owners and founders make is scaling too quickly. Red flags that signal a business is scaling too fast include;
- Lack of Process Documentation: Without knowing what your organization is doing (and how you’re doing it), you don’t know how well your current approach to doing business is actually working. It also prevents helpful accountability, which keeps people from doing their best work.
- Hiring Too Many People for the Work You Need: Overhiring means overspending, and wasting time onboarding people whose roles are (unfortunately) not sustainable.
- Expanding Offerings Without Knowing What’s Working: Doing too much/adding too much without appropriate analysis can bring things to a grinding halt.
- Lack of Delegation (and Overwhelmed Leaders/Teams): “I know how to do it, so I can do it in less time” is a limiting leadership excuse that causes a lot of process bottlenecks.
- Unclear Finances: “If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.” And it’s a lot easier to get to know your financials on the front end than to figure out their status when multiple processes are stuck or struggling.
Scaling doesn’t mean doing more; it often means doing the same (or less work) with greater impact. And you can’t make that happen if operations are muddled, or if one or two people insist on doing everything.
Expert Scaling Support, Tailored to You
Through Fractional COO and operational support, we bridge the gap between strategy and execution; we can do both. Whether you need help crafting and delivering a plan to scale, someone to jump into implementation, or both, we’ve got the expertise and flexibility to build the systems you need— and to make sure they perform. We’re not just an advisor, we’re an extension of your team. Ready to see what we can do together? Book a call with our business scaling experts today.