Scaling and growth are oftentimes interchanged when it comes to businesses. Scaling needs to be differentiated from growth. Sure, growth generates great revenues and exponentiates your business, but it has greater chances of meeting saturation. Scaling, on the other hand, aims at widening your audience demographic and is hence an immediate concern.
In this regard, you need to keep a few things in mind if you are a small business, or plan on scaling, or both. Scaling can be tricky business (pun intended), but you should be good to go if you keep the following in mind.
Simplicity Saves Time
Most great businesses have relied on the moral principles of simplicity. Be it in their design language, or overall approach to business intricacies like marketing, great businesses have kept it simple. The said idea seems to be borrowed from the moral principles of minimalism and simplicity, but boy does it work wonders.
The simplest example of this is marketing. You do not need to unnecessarily complicate this, for it sucks time. Say you are a tech company and are not sure as to how and where you must market your product. Just check for the latest trends in tech, and see how you can use social media and amalgamate that with your product itself.
For instance, say you have a video editing tool. Make the most of social media to post an Instagram reel or a short video over YouTube showing how effective your tool is. This is a hassle-free step as it does not require you to unnecessarily complicate something as simple as effective scaling.
Additionally, not only are you making the most of already available tools to push your avenues but more importantly, you are saving time. Way too many birds with one stone, or reel, as the case may be.
Compartmentalization
We do not want to make this too philosophical, but what is life without it, really. In this regard, prioritizing is yet another philosophical tool that you should make the most of, especially if you are a small company. Remember those kids buying an unnecessary number of books but not reading them? Yeah, you do not want to be that.
Know where to invest, and where to avoid. Brands like Lamborghini are known to be aloof when it comes to pesky TV marketing, because let us face it, if you are an owner, chances are that you aren’t watching TV in the first place.
Let’s take another example. Consider yourself to be an accounting company with a fully functional app. Would you invest in making the app more marketable, or more usable, given a choice?
If you have a software tool that manages something as delicate as accounts, you will need to ensure that it is free of any bugs and glitches. You can use bug reporting tools like Shake SDK to help rid your app of bugs. This would make it much more usable, owing to the fact that a greater number of bug reports correlates to more time and resources being used to fix them.
Or you could just invest in it in billboards gloating about how good your bug-ridden software tool is. Just kidding, don’t invest in billboards.
Please Your Customer, Please
Lastly, if you are planning on scaling the right way, know your customer, and please them. Without any ulterior euphemism involved here, we mean, quite literally. After you have scouted your appropriate demographic, you need to take their feedback and know what to improve in order to spread to a wider spectrum of audience, i.e., in better scaling.
A study conducted by Nielson with respect to media showed how audiences responded positively to personal touches in regards to recommendations when it came to media products such as shows. This should be a great avenue for you, for now all you need to do is to ensure that you know what your audience likes and improve that to ensure further spread of your product or service.
Much like asking for your lover’s hand from their parents, scaling is an intricate process that requires you to gauge and vet what your audience wants and give it to them accordingly.
To Conclude
Every major business was once a start-up. Every irrelevant venture was once selling products like hotcakes. Depending on how you envision your business growing, your business will venture out into more avenues. If you keep the aforementioned ideas in mind, you should technically be scaling efficiently, and of course, growing effectively.
