December 18, 2015
Most small businesses are sub five people, that means that most of the know-how within a business is actually built within either the business owner or the few people within that business. Here are my 6 top tips for creating a scalable small business.
These tips emphasise the importance of process documentation, automation, customer engagement, strategic hiring, product adaptability, and a strong focus on core values and USPs for creating a scalable and sustainable small business.
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Most small businesses are sub five people, that means that most of the know-how within a business is built within either the business owner or the few people within that business.
Make sure that each role within your business is teachable, learnable and repeatable to others so that as your business grows you don't have to go through a complex training process each time.
If you document your processes into a user manual, any new hires who come into your business can refer back to those manuals to work out how to do key tasks within the business.
Find the core values within your business that deliver competitive advantage. Ask yourself, what are your "Unique Selling Points" (USPs) for your products but also business as a whole. What makes you stand out above your direct competitors within your marketplace and how do these constitute as core values which your business really thrives upon and which your customers will ultimately end up buying into.
If you can make your processes teachable, learnable, and repeatable and have a strong set of core values constituting a culture it's going to make youe business more appealing to investors. If you leave the business it's the tangible assets that you leave behind that the investors are going to be investing in and buying into.
We're now in a great time whereby there are tens of thousands of cloud based applications on the web so make sure you use these applications.
For simple tasks like bookkeeping, there's Sage 1, Quickbooks, Xero, just to name a few. There are all sorts of cloud based applications that make the bookkeeping process much easier. It is much more effieicent compared to the old methods of accounting, where your accountant comes in once a year and takes away a box full of leverage files of paperwork; he can have immediate access to your accounts using one of these cloud based tools.
That's just one way of automating a process within your business. The more processes you can automate, the more profitable that your business is likely to be. Instead of you spending time doing these time consuming tasks, there are tools out there which mean that you can use your time working on the business and not in it.
You've already got a loyal customer base that exists for you. Have you ever asked yourself the question, "How often have I contacted each and every one of those people in my data base of customers, in the CRM tool?"
For most businesses the answer is "Well, I haven't contacted them, they've bought my product and then I've never spoken to them again." Or if it's a subscription based tool, they're still paying their subscription so they must be happy.
It's important that you are in regular contact with those customers, it's an opportunity to up sell and cross sell to them if you've developed new products. You could make more money out of them by upselling but equally, also it's an opportunity to make sure that you're dealing with any problems which they might have. If you touch base and ask how's things going, if there's a problem or for whatever reason the service level has declined, it gives you an opportunity to correct that problem sooner and hopefully it might be that it's not just that one client who's experiencing that problem. It might be that a number of your clients are experiencing the same problem so you fix it for one and you fix it for a number of clients.
It means that your legacy of customers is always expanding rather than people leaving and you don't know why they might be leaving.
You want to hire well within your business. You don't want to hire somebody just to fill a position, you want to hire the best person for that role and if it means not hiring at all, don't hire them.
The key thing here, is about having the ability within your organization to deliver an increase in sales but also added value into your business.
You want whatever interaction a customer has with your business to be the best that it can be. Hiring sub par employees is a good way of losing customers. If you've given a lot of responsibility to the new hire, you don't always know or have control of why there's a problem or why the customers might be leaving.
Investing in your employees ensures that you have the ability to match demand. Especially if you're expecting growth, if sales are increasing you must ensure your new customers are getting the same level of service that all of your previous set of customers have had. This is about culture, about creating a team that understands and shares your vision and the core values to creating a sustainable and scalable business for many years to come.
If you can't find the right person internally to do the job then look to outsource that job to another agency or a freelancer has a really high level of expertise for that particular task. You can also reach out to executive recruitment firms to help you find professional candidates to help your business reach the next level. It will give you the time to focus on other areas of your business.
Think objectively about your own products and ask yourself “is this the right product to service that particular market?” This allows you to quickly pivot and if you find problems with your products. If you ask your customers for feedback and they are experiencing problems, you can tweak and change that product or move into a different marketplace all together and expand the sales of that product and create scale within your business.
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