How to scale your business for growth

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10/07/2017

Many businesses that have a rapid increase in sales can suffer from growing pains; being unable to scale the business fast enough to meet demand.

Can you scale with what you’ve got?

Before you start to invest in new equipment, move to larger premises or start an employment drive, review your current operation and see if you can scale internally first. Consider:

• Use contractors – rather than new hires, do you have a source of contract staff to help fill any short-term gaps? If the growth is sustainable, then you can make a decision on hiring.
• Extend the use of equipment – can you increase the operational hours of existing equipment or machinery by running double shifts? Can you hire or short term lease equipment?
• Make sure staff are productive – make sure your employees are working efficiently and that if they don’t have the necessary skills they’ll need for upcoming growth, look at training.
• Increase prices – if you're seeing an increased demand for what you're selling, can you scale profits by increasing prices where appropriate? If a price increase slows demand that could help solve the capacity issue, and you may end up making a similar profit win increased margins.

Increasing your capacity while improving the efficiency of your systems and processes means you're more likely to be able to scale your business.

What can you add to increase capacity?

While it’s important to maximise your internal resources, scaling your business for growth almost always means adding to your operations in terms of staff, equipment, facilities and finance.

• The right staff – if there are vital skills missing among your staff, look at upskilling them through training, or hiring someone with the knowledge and experience you need.
• Enough equipment and facilities – to increase production on a scalable level, you’ll need the equipment. It’s worth investing in updated machinery to increase output. Consider moving to larger premises and replacing older equipment with faster/higher output machinery.
• Suppliers you can rely on – if you’re going to need more raw materials for production, or more inventory to sell, make sure suppliers can meet the increased demand. If not, consider sourcing alternate suppliers just in case.

Scalable growth comes down to what you can do with what you’ve already got, and what you’ll need to add in order to achieve business growth. Don’t forget that ‘scalable’ means increasing all parts of your business to cope with extra demand, and ideally it’s ‘manageable’ growth.

Reviewing your internal systems and processes to ensure maximum efficiency is important. But even more crucial is making sure you have what you need in terms of staff, facilities, equipment and capital to achieve that growth.

Advice and resources

• Check out Entrepreneur’s 3 basics for scaling your business.

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