Scaling your business is all about taking a planned approach to growth. Companies that don’t prepare to scale will face major roadblocks and may even fail. One of the best ways to minimize this risk is to know the barriers to growth and prepare well for them.
Lack of Leadership
As a business scales, there’s a higher level of responsibility needed to lead it. It requires stronger and more effective leadership to take your business to the next level. You’ll need to hire, train, manage, and work with new people, and these skills are essential for keeping them on track and motivated.
Trying to Scale Without an Organizational Structure
Until now, you’ve managed by yourself or with a small team. There’s been little need to create an organizational chart and clearly assign roles. A business with just a few employees is simple, but you can’t scale this way.
In order to scale, you’ll need to create an organizational structure that’s scalable. It should designate roles and responsibilities, and who will report to whom. Then, as you go about building your team, you can plug new staff into this structure.
Infrastructure That’s Not Ready to Scale
When you’re a small business, you probably manage much of the work yourself. Everything is a custom project. But this isn’t a scalable infrastructure for your business when it starts growing.
As you serve a larger base of customers and clients, you need standardization and efficiency. Each process needs to be streamlined, including documentation for each of your processes that enables anyone to do them.
Key areas that need scalable infrastructure include IT, customer service, facilities, legal services, and finances. You need to build the infrastructure for a large-scale organization before growing so your business doesn’t get overwhelmed.
Failure to Think Strategically
Scaling takes a small business and gives it the capacity to grow into a large organization. It puts you into new markets going up against different competitors. It requires much more strategic thinking and decision-making. For business owners who have never thought strategically on this scale before, it can be a major challenge.
Not Enough Market Information
All decisions regarding scaling a business require up-to-date information from the market. You’ll need data on customers, the overall market, and your competitors. You may be marketing new products, moving into new markets, and adding new marketing channels.
You’ve already done your marketing to where you’re at now. Next, you need to get even more feedback and data from the market than before.
Fear of Losing Control
Finally, one of the biggest barriers to scaling is your mindset. In order to scale, you have to let go of some control of your business. Up until now, you might have handled everything yourself. You know your competencies. Now, you need to entrust some aspects of your business to others. This is very hard for many business owners to do, but overcoming this barrier will help you scale the right way.
Want to learn more about how you can scale your business? Head over here: Building a Scalable Business
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