Sponsored by UniTel Voice:
There will come a time when your business responsibilities will grow beyond your current capacity. You might find that you’re at a standstill with earnings because you can’t handle any more work. The solution to this problem is to either stay where you are with no further growth or start scaling up your business.
Here are a few tips and tricks for scaling up your business for continued success.
Find a Workspace
As your business grows, your at-home office may not cut it anymore. You’ll need a workspace where you’re comfortable meeting with clients and collaborating with contractors and team members on projects. There are a few options to consider. You could find a permanent workspace and pay rent to have an office. Alternatively, you could look at local co-working spaces and drastically reduce your overhead and stress.
Co-working spaces are areas you can pay to use in conjunction with other businesses. Depending on the space, they can come equipped with the basics — like desks and wi-fi — or with luxury details like an on-site gym and food service.
Streamline Communications
Email arguably revolutionized the way we communicate. However, the system is flawed when it comes to communicating back and forth in an organized and timely manner. Sometimes hours of work can be saved by simply picking up the phone and calling someone.
Having your communication methods streamlined is a necessity when your business starts to grow. Start using a centralized UniTel Voice phone system to ensure all phone calls are coming through one switchboard.
Have a standardized way of communicating with clients and project team members, such as an app like Slack. Project management applications such as Trello are useful for keeping live, up-to-date progress on projects. These can easily be turned into a summary to send via email if your clients insist.
Automate What You Can
Administrative work can be a black hole for your productive time when running a business. That’s why it’s important to automate what you can. Spending a couple of hours a month on a social media scheduling app is a more efficient use of your time than spending twenty minutes every day. Automatic invoicing and bill payments will save you from logging on and getting sucked into money management.
The more time you spend setting up these processes at the front end, the less day-to-day upkeep these parts of your business will require.
Clearly Define Your Goals
It’s all well and good that you want to grow your business, but doing so without a sense of direction can cause a plethora of issues. Before you start the arduous task of scaling your business, determine where you want to be.
Do you want to have double the clients by the end of this year? Are your goals revenue based? Once you have a set goal, you can work backward to conduct an action plan. What steps must you take to reach that goal? What timeline are you allowing yourself?
Remember to set SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. If your goals are too vague or unrealistically grand, you will have a difficult time reaching them.
Outsource
If you’re focused on growing your business, you need to let go of the reins and delegate some work. Entrepreneurs tend to grow their business from the ground up without much external support, so it can be challenging to relinquish control over different aspects of their work. However, if you’re too busy spending time trying to design your website, you won’t have time to find new clients.
Write a list of tasks that can be delegated to a virtual assistant or contract worker. Remember to measure your opportunity cost. When you finally reach your goals, start the process over again and keep growing.
