I Was Away From My Business for Two Weeks. How To Scale Your Business.
Recently, I was away from the day to day grind of my business – for about two weeks. Everything worked just fine, nothing bad happened and maybe business even got better. You may have a retail business, maybe it’s an online e-commerce business, or maybe it’s online content production or maybe it’s a local services business, such as accounting, mental health, etc.
Whatever type of business you have, the principles of scaling your business for growth are the same.
- Have processes, systematic processes.
- Embrace automation.
- Have a team.
- Delegate to others.
Process and systems.
There’s a LOT to do in running a business. Orders come in and need to be processed. Documents need to be reviewed. Products need to come in from manufacturing and on and one. The ONLY way you can do scale and not go insane is to build process into your business – have a clear operations plan – for how things get done. Carolyn Crummey, owner of Virtasktic (digital communications, backoffice, and marketing support) is often emphasizing this to me.
Having a process ensures everything gets done, with the same predictable excellence and outcome. It also enables everyone on your team to have a template to follow. A new hire can easily follow your process and get things done in a short amount of time.
Embrace automation.
By enabling automation, you ensure that as much can be done automatically without too much (or any) human intervention. I was speaking to an entrepreneur today and she was telling me about her order system for her e-commerce company. Orders come in via Shopify and then shipping labels are automatically printed out for the staff to pack and ship product. There are many ways automation can benefit your business – saving you time, money and headache. Your staff can focus on other things while the automated process does its work.
Have a team.
If you’re working solo – you can only get done so many things. With a team, you get expertise (you don’t know everything) and you have others who can take on the responsibilities of a growing business. For those of you who have staff, you must understand how to hire, and how to manage a team.
Delegate to others.
Having a team is great, but if you don’t learn how to delegate and manage, your business can’t operate effectively. Delegating to others is a skill that needs to be honed.