Considering the name, it’s not surprising that startups receive much advice focused on starting up.
A founder trying to build out a functional business will find many tips, tricks, and guides to help them along the way. At some point, your startup needs to move beyond being a new business and become something larger.
Scaling up is a critical moment for any business. The challenge of scaling your startup too quickly and recklessly is that you will create a whole host of organization problems that will be difficult to resolve. Premature scaling may even cause your business to fail. The downside, though, is that if you scale too slowly, you will miss out on key opportunities that come with more resources and revenues.
There will always be growing pains for small businesses. At some point in your journey, your business will outgrow its former self and it is often a process that separates the wheat from the chaff. If you’re a founder with a desire to scale, you’ll need to be aware of specific roadblocks and problems along the way, as well as how to overcome them, if you want to succeed.
Also it is critical to distinguish between growth and scaling. There is a slight distinction between them although they can be used interchangeably.
Growth occurs when your company’s revenue increases in proportion to the addition of new resources, such as assets, technology, labor, and product features. Consider a company that increases its contact centre employees to meet rising product demand.
Whereas, scaling is a type of growth, but without the frills. Companies “scale” when their income grows dramatically without investing a lot of money to acquire more resources, resulting in higher profit margins while keeping costs low. (This is why entrepreneurs are concerned with productivity. The idea is to have a higher output while keeping the input relatively low.)
Overall, based on your company’s eventual aim, both growth and scaling are viable options. You can decide to grow or scale when you figure out what’s best for your business, your team, and your customers.
Let’s take a look at some of the factors to consider while you try to scale your company.
5 Ways to Scale a Startup
- Resolve your consumers’ issues.
It is quite effective to provide genuine value to your customers. The significance of this cannot be emphasized. Offering a solution to a real problem that people care about will make running a business much easier. Canva is an example of this. They had over 50,000 users sign up to use the platform within the first month of its launch in 2013. Six years later, they’ve grown to over 15 million active monthly users in 190 countries, with over 1 billion designs created.
2. Marketing strategy
Of course, for a lot of start-ups, the principal focus is product development and it will always be until the “release” stage) but what about all the other elements that help sustain the growth of your start-up . You may choose to focus on search engine optimization, referral programs and content marketing etc that enables your startup to remain at the forefront of your audience’s mind, to get the best possible result with marketing. It is imperative to focus on what works and although there are alot of different ways to achieve your goals, ensure you focus on the most high-impact and cost-effective marketing strategies.
3. Mentors and networking
Starting off as a founder might be a daunting task at times, but having like-minded people to bounce ideas off of and work with makes problem solving and innovation easier. So find local meetups and co-working spaces where you can connect with peers. Speaking with others who are going through the same thing or who have been there and done that is not only rewarding, but it also raises the likelihood of your business thriving.
4. Make your corporate culture appealing.
An amazing culture has the potential to create huge growth. So how do you optimize company culture for growth? There are no hard and fast rules but there are general tips you can consider.
Magic happens when everyone is empowered to “own” their domain. Give your team permission to experiment intentionally and celebrate innovation and collaboration.
It’s also important to bear in mind that success requires physical and mental stamina, emotional intelligence, and powerful habits that are reinforced daily across the organization. Clarify why you exist as an organization, identify your values and create systems to uphold them. That’s how you become fiercely focused and build a cohesive team.
Also, as your company scales rapidly, it becomes easier for employees to lose touch with the company’s history and culture. Maintaining and/or evolving company culture can be a lot harder than it sounds, but it’s essential to ensure that all employees stay on-mission, working towards the same goals, make the right decisions when the founder’s not in the room, and feel valued and excited to come to work every day.
5. Examine your present business processes
When attempting to scale your startup, it is tempting to go to external resources such as new personnel or new clients to enhance the output of your business. However, by optimizing your present procedures, you can attain a comparable degree of growth. It is assumed that inefficient operations might cost your company a certain amount of your annual income. Consider how much growth you could experience if you had this money to reinvest in your startup.
Wrapping Up
Getting your startup off the ground may have been challenging, but scaling it up will provide a whole new set of issues to contend with. The reality is that scaling up your firm will necessitate a different skill set than the one you used to get it started in the first place — you must manage both growth and risk. In practice, this means planning ahead of time so that the firm has enough resources to meet the needs of its clients and consumers, while also ensuring that those resources are managed properly for your organization. To summarize, scaling a tech startup entails abandoning your old, tight-fitting processes in order to identify more appropriate avenues for growth.
