Is Your Business Truly Prepared To Grow?

The first two or three years for a startup might strike you as some of the most challenging. You’re trying to get on your feet, to get all your services up and running, and to get enough customers to start growing. But, growing itself can be a huge challenge that the majority of startups actually fail. You need to make sure that all the signs are there that you’re ready to scale, however. Is your business truly prepared to grow?

Budget

Obviously, one of the signs that you’re ready to scale is that you have good, reliable and repeatable revenue coming in the business. But if you’re not ready to organize it effectively, you might end up falling flat of your plans. Besides deciding who and what you need to invest in, make sure that you budget fully for it. From that budget, you can see if you’ve built up enough funds to reinvest yourself, or if you might need to look for outside funding opportunities.

People

If you’re taking on new revenue streams or expanding to new locations, then the chances are you’re going to be hiring more people. If this is your biggest recruitment drive yet, you need to pay more attention to how you’re hiring. As www.theundercoverrecruiter.com, it’s not just about the skills of the people you hire. You have to identify the parts of the corporate culture that have allowed you to succeed that far and ensure that the new team members fit it. You also have to consider how you restructure your teams. You might have to consider hiring managers from the first time, which means identifying the leaders from your own team.

Infrastructure

As you grow bigger, you have less opportunity to work in the business yourself. You need managers to help but you also need an infrastructure to help. For instance, IT systems like those managed by www.clearfuze.com create the infrastructure that allows digital resources and data to be shared more freely through the business. Systematizing the methods of doing certain tasks creates the infrastructure that makes sure that individual employees aren’t working in ways that later prove incompatible with one another. You need the business to become less person-driven and more systems-driven.

Marketing

When you scale the business, it becomes hungrier. It needs more revenue to sustain. Scaling usually begins with identifying another source of revenue, but you need to make sure that the target market, whether it’s expanding on an old one, or bringing in a new one, is aware of the new value offered by the business. This means stepping it up big time with the marketing and branding. To that end, if you’re no marketing wizard, this might be the time to consider getting a professional involved in evolving the image of the business.

If you can make it past that initial, difficult scaling period then a whole new level of success can await your business. You have to take it seriously, however. If you don’t organize your approach to the wall that is scaling, you won’t make it over.