How to Take the First Steps in Scaling Your Business

How to Take the First Steps in Scaling Your Business

Most entrepreneurs are hungry to bring their company to the next level.

Whether they operate a family-run business or a rapidly evolving tech startup, there is always another milestone in sight. Business owners want to their companies to make an impact with their customers and communities, and they want to keep honing their craft.

But with 27.9 million small businesses in the United States alone, there is no shortage of competition for the same pieces of the pie.

How can you take steps in scaling your business, and do what your competitors are not willing to do?

Roadblocks to Scale

Today’s infographic comes to us from Brunner Consulting, and it breaks down common roadblocks to scaling as well as potential solutions to the problem of decision fatigue.

To begin, we’ll look at a poll of U.S. small business owners, which gives perspective on the challenges most often faced by companies with fewer than 10 employees:

• Profitability (50%)
• Hiring new employees (48%)
• Growing revenue (41%)
• Cash flow (38%)

Unless a business has deep pocketbooks or is venture-backed, there are several obstacles here that may prevent companies from scaling successfully.

A lack of profitability is an obvious limitation, but it’s also clear that revenue growth, cash flow, and adding new employees can be growing pains that may derail any long-term plans.

Decision Fatigue

Why is scaling your business so challenging?

It’s because most types of businesses are not really scalable to begin with. The only sustainable way to scale for most companies is to grow revenue while decreasing operating costs, and for many traditional small businesses (i.e. bakeries, restaurants, hardware stores, consulting, etc.) this can be incredibly difficult.

Even if you come up with a scalable business model, there is yet another obstacle that can prevent your from growing the right way: decision fatigue.

In a growing and evolving company, entrepreneurs can’t do everything – and when they try to make every big and small decision, it affects the quality of those decisions. It can lead to being unnecessarily risk averse, maintaining the status quo, or even avoiding decisions altogether.

Scaling Your Business: First Steps

For a business to grow, there has to be more than one decision-maker.

There are two main routes to this:

1. Delegate Responsibility
In a typical small business, employees find and diagnose problems, while owners focus on solving them. However, by delegating these day-to-day decisions to employees, it frees up owners to work on the big picture items that can fuel growth.

2. Play to Your Strengths
Entrepreneurs can’t do it all, so it’s best to play to your strengths. To do this, outsource business departments that are outside of your wheelhouse. Often those may include things like bookkeeping, marketing, customer service, or website design.

Decentralizing decision-making is one of the first steps in scaling your business – and no matter how you do this, it frees you to focus on the big problems.