Ready to scale? The what, when, and how of monumental growth

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: Scaling a business is different from growing a business. Growth means something like increasing revenue 10% over last year, or making more sales. But when it comes to the scaling process, now you’re now talking multiplication. Exponential growth. Taking the business beyond yourself to a new level of operation. 

Instead of flashy marketing campaigns, scaling a business is all about systems, people, and processes. Marketing becomes another department and system in the machine — not your everyday priority. So if you’re looking for ways to make more money, but without changing your underlying business operations, this article will be a good one to read and tuck away for later. 

But if you’re looking to become a market leader or reach a higher level by developing a business scaling strategy, you have come to the right place.

And when you’re ready, WooCommerce is built to scale and capable of hosting enterprise ecommerce operations who are looking for ultimate flexibility, complete data and IP ownership, and lower operational costs.

Nearly every business wants to grow. But not every business is ready to scale up. Scaling a business takes years and it takes much more than increasing your marketing budget. 

Some businesses are only truly profitable when they operate on a grand scale. Other businesses are competing for market share to protect future profitability. So when we talk about scaling in this article, we’re not talking about venture-backed firms or some of the more glamorous situations you hear about on television or entrepreneur incubators.

We’re talking about a more traditional set up where you, and maybe a few partners, own a small business and want to really make a run at rapid, profitable growth. 

For most of these more traditional situations, to scale your business, you’ll want to have a few things in place already, beyond just some years of experience. Let’s look at some of them:

Stability in cash flow

Before you can scale a business, you should have some predictability with your business finances that positions you for sustainable growth. You should have manageable expenses, not too much debt, and some healthy liquidity. You shouldn’t be in a situation where you’re worried about making payroll or unsure of your monthly revenue. 

“Will we make enough this month?” There’s no shame in that question, but it’s not one on the minds of small business owners who are ready to scale. 

A clear picture of untapped market demand

Scaling a business requires more than just increasing sales and getting new customers. It’s about more than trying a new marketing campaign or just having a growing business.

To scale your business, you need a clear understanding of where your expanded revenue projections are coming from. There must be an untapped customer demand and prevailing market trends of increased demand that you can articulate. And this potential market must have a decent probability of being captured by your business as your scaling strategy unfolds.

A strong track record of performance

Scaling a business means building on what’s working. You need a solid foundation of proven business performance before you scale up. Scaling a business is something you do after working out the kinks of starting and growing a business. 

Scaling happens after you “know what you’re doing”. If what you’re doing is working well, and you have the data, key performance indicators, financial resources, and expertise to understand why and how it’s working, you may be ready to scale your business.

Your business survives if you take a break

Have you ever taken two weeks off and not touched your business at all during that time? Does the very thought terrify you? Businesses that are ready to scale must move beyond the phase of being completely dependent on the small business owner.

If your business would fall apart within a few days if you disappeared, then you’re probably not ready to scale yet. But if you have some functioning systems and competent personnel who you can trust to run the ship while you’re gone for a while, that’s a good indication you’re ready to scale.

You have untapped potential in your systems and processes

Successful businesses run, in large part, on automation. CRMs have all sorts of capabilities. Business infrastructure systems like these can typically do much more than new and small businesses use them for.

Have you found yourself paying attention to some of these higher-order capabilities that were always way out of reach when your growing business was in its frantic early stages?

If you’re starting to pay attention to the untapped potential of the systems at work behind the scenes in your business, that’s another hint that you might be primed for scaling.

Before we get to how to scale a business, it’s a good idea to be aware of the most important considerations. Keeping these on your mind will help you avoid pitfalls and build a solid foundation for long-term growth. 

The speed at which you scale

Venture-backed firms and the entrepreneurs you see on television have teams of experienced advisors and plenty of funding. When scaling, they’ll make fewer mistakes and can usually afford the small ones that are inevitable. 

It’s a bit different if you’re scaling on your own as a business owner. 

Change can be good. But too much change too fast can cause serious problems. For example, businesses that try to scale up too quickly sometimes find their supply chain stressed and their inventory running dry. 

They also can lose the handle on their basic business processes, and start to miss things. That leads to disappointed customers and employees having to put out lots of fires. Overworked employees start to lose motivation. And with so much more to do, core tasks might get neglected because new tasks keep piling up. 

Scaling up successfully requires advance planning around key factors so you can follow a predictable timeline, adding on new procedures and increasing production capacity at a pace that allows you to accommodate further growth. 

Hiring the right people

To scale up a business, that typically means hiring more people — including managers and people in new leadership positions. For your new key roles, you need to hire the right people. At the very least, go beyond your friends, relatives, and existing employees. Yes, you might find some great new hires in your existing network, but it’s unlikely that all the talent for your top roles just happens to be people you already know.

Branch out. Do the hiring process the right way. Consider using a staffing firm. And don’t hire just for job skills or past work experience. Hire for soft skills, too. Look for alignment with your business core values. And don’t hire only people who think and act like you. Hire a diverse set of leaders who have complementary strengths and perspectives. 

Also, sometimes you don’t need any new hires at all. 

Sometimes there is automation that can do the work better and more efficiently than people can. In other situations, you can hire contract workers instead of employees, or hire outside firms for certain tasks. Not every job requires a new full-time or permanent employee. Tap into outside expertise. 

Using the right infrastructure

Using the latest technology and operational systems helps you grow faster and more successfully. If you want to launch a bunch of new initiatives and open up some new markets, choose software that will help you move forward rather than hold you back.

For example, you might still be using the same patchwork of spreadsheets, a basic email platform, and your best attempt at bookkeeping. If you want to start doing personalized marketing and tracking each customer’s lifetime value and purchase history, customer relationship management tools can put more of your data and processes in one place, connecting your online store with your backend systems and enabling you to go much further. 

You’ll want to pass bookkeeping on to a qualified CPA (many will take care of basic bookkeeping and year-end taxes for just a few hundred dollars per month) or at least upgrade your software.

This is a good example of scaling up by following the correct procedure. First, get your support systems and backend processes positioned for growth. Then, begin the work of scaling. 

Allowing yourself the room to grow

It’s hard to set records in the high jump with weights attached to your feet. In the same way, if your business is still hampered with debt, excess or outdated inventory, unfavorable agreements with third parties, vendors, or other businesses, property obligations, or other restrictions, you won’t be as nimble as is ideal when looking to scale up a business. 

Get free from as many entanglements as you can before you attempt to scale your business. 

Focusing

Scaling a business requires focused effort and a fixation on getting your new processes and systems in place. You have a vision, and you want to turn it into reality.

But once you start scaling, there’s a good chance your efforts will get noticed. And you may find yourself getting pitched with all sorts of services and shiny objects. New opportunities you hadn’t considered. Some of this can be good — but it needs to fit within your current endeavor — scaling up your business. 

If your scaling plan has been well-considered and well thought out, you want to stick to it as much as possible. This helps employees stay engaged and on track, ready to help you move forward. Don’t lose focus getting caught up with a bunch of additional things just because other companies are doing them.  

Retaining the right level of control

With smaller businesses, it’s fairly common for the owner — usually the founder — to have their hands in everything. They may not still be doing everything, but key decisions often still need their approval. They want to have a say in what’s happening. 

When you scale a business, the owner has to accept that they will no longer be able to control every aspect of their business. If they try, this will limit the potential for growth. It has to be allowed to grow beyond what one or a small handful of people can manage on their own. 

Let’s take a look at some of the strategies you can use for large scale overall growth in a small business. These are in no particular order, and some will apply to certain small businesses more than others. 

Clarify your guiding purpose

What are you trying to achieve in the process of scaling your business?

Expand or open up to new markets? Launch more products? Acquire other businesses? Secure new revenue streams? Increase profit margins? Gain a competitive edge? There are all sorts of forms successful scaling may take, and you can’t pursue them all at once. Scaling a business is not about overnight success.

Be clear on what is motivating you to scale and the means by which you plan to do it. 

This will affect the people you hire, what you’re hiring them to do, how your product development will change, how you develop customer relationships — it’s possible that every aspect of how you currently do business will get shredded and replaced with a new approach. 

Know the target, and you’ll remain focused on achieving it.

Hire for relevant experience

If this is your first attempt at developing a business scaling strategy, you simply won’t find the expertise you need within your current walls. If no one you know has done this before, you’re not likely to have optimal long term success unless you step outside and bring in experienced and fresh perspectives. 

In other words, you can learn the hard way, or you can benefit from the experience of others who have already done so. There is no official blueprint for scaling a business. 

So as you prepare to scale and develop a new business strategy, try to hire people who have done this before. Ideally, they have experience dealing with companies about the size of yours. Are you a small business looking to scale up to become a mid-size business? 

Find leaders who have been down that road before with other businesses. Are you a mid-size business wanting to scale even further? You’ll need a different sort of experience to help with this transition.

When finding your new talent, look for specific experience in operations. This is where roles like “Operations Manager” and “Chief Operations Officer” become relevant. These experts will be able to define and document processes and identify opportunities for scaling efficiencies that others simply can’t.

Develop or refine standard operating procedures

With your new operations hire in place, you should review any standard operating procedures (SOPs) to improve the communication of key actions or even refine the processes themselves. 

Don’t have standard operating procedures? Now’s the time to get these kinds of things in place. You can’t scale unless you can efficiently onboard new personnel and clearly define their work processes. 

Once they have a good understanding of your business, reviewing current SOPs or creating new ones from scratch should be the first job of your new Operations Manager. 

Clarify your new target audience

Scaling up usually means expanding your target market beyond your existing customers. This could refer to geography — are you expanding to a new location or region? 

It could refer to demographics or lifestyles — do you have new product lines in mind that don’t align with your current customers?

It could also mean drilling down more into your existing audience, and finding new and more profitable ways to engage with a smaller segment of them. 

When you successfully scale a business at this level, you have to start something new. Most of the time, finding these new growth opportunities means engaging with people who aren’t doing business with you at the moment. Know who these people are. 

Do some market research. Consider writing a new business plan. 

Get help engaging your new audience

Especially if you’re expanding your market reach geographically in some way, you’re probably going to need a new set of skills and strategies to make a big splash with these new locations. 

For that, you’ll need outside help. 

Look to partner with agencies or experienced contractors who know how to reach the new markets you have in mind. This can range from opening new brick and mortar stores, to running digital marketing targeted to new areas, to enhanced search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, and to many other marketing tactics.

With a modified business plan, which you can also develop with outside help, you can outline how your business scaling process will look, at least as far as you can see now. 

Find systems and processes that work, and keep using them until they don’t. As you continue to scale, this is something you should anticipate. Nothing works forever. And what worked in California might not work in Connecticut. 

Look for sustainable growth 

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got. And again, if you just want slow and steady 5% growth per year, that’s a perfectly reasonable approach.

But to successfully scale and increase sales by orders of magnitude, you need to expand your horizons. Think big picture. Go beyond. All those other clichés. 

It might mean trading customer data with a non-competitive company (if allowed) so you can do some cross-marketing to an already strong list. It might mean new product lines or new services. It might mean recurring revenue models. 

This is one reason businesses sometimes acquire other businesses. The other company is already doing something well that complements your own business. So rather than try to build something new from the ground up, you just buy the other business and add it to your portfolio. 

These sorts of moves require big scale thinking, not business as usual. 

Improve automation and systems

This is a huge topic, and the specifics will vary for each company. But the overarching idea is to scale up your capacity and internal processes without needing the proportional increase in human resources — by automating activities like inventory management to save time. 

In other words, long-term success and higher profit margins should not be directly linked to your number of employees. For another cliché: “work smarter, not harder.” 

With automation, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing, and you’ll be scaling up your revenue potential at the same time.

Using your CRM, integrations, funnels, customer journeys, customer and employee data, onboarding, payroll, project management, scheduling, and all the many other systems and automated business processes available, you’ll be able to scale up your operations without necessarily needing to hire a bunch of people. 

With automation, software systems, and integrations, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing, and you’ll be scaling up your revenue potential at the same time.

For example, with the proper automation and integration, you can link your warehouse inventory to your online store. With this, you can inform customers when a product is almost sold out, which will improve the customer experience, while also notifying your inventory managers that you need to refill your supplies soon. 

Instead of keeping up with tax compliance regulations for each state, you could automate tax calculations and tax filing for each relevant state using an extension like Avalara AvaTax. 

Automating tasks like these is what enables business growth that goes beyond merely increasing revenue a little over last year. Because no matter how big your company gets, developing scalable systems makes everything work better — for customers and your internal operations.

How to identify automation opportunities 

How do you know what you can automate? This goes back to your standard operating procedures. Your team should review each one with automation in mind. 

First, they’ll need to identify every opportunity for automation. 

Next, the team should evaluate each one in terms of potential time saved and the cost to automate (Does an existing solution exist? Will one need to be developed using something like Zapier?). 

You may eventually decide to implement every possible automation, but you’ve got to start somewhere. So with this information in hand, you and your team can now prioritize automations based on those that will save your team the most time with the lowest implementation costs.

Scale up your customer service

How many customers can your company realistically handle?

There’s customer service that is reactionary, and then there’s customer service that’s proactive. One of these aligns with a business model that wants to scale up for long-term growth.

Reactionary customer service means the customer has to do all the work to get a response. Dig through your website, find your contact page, and contact you through whatever channels you offer.

Proactive customer service places high value on your customer relationships. It makes it clear to the customer that their business is valued and that you want them to have the best and easiest possible experience. That means you make it easy for them to find help and get questions answered. 

You’ll need FAQ pages, phone numbers, live chat, and a plan for prompt responsiveness. It also means things like including a “how to reach us” card in your product shipments, automated 

post-purchase emails that offer ways to ask questions or give customer feedback, and other things that go beyond customer expectations.  

Delegate and relinquish control

Delegation is the hidden superpower of businesses that want to scale. 

The more you gain the ability to let go of the tasks you don’t need to be involved with, the more you liberate your business to grow by leaps and bounds.

Here are a few ways to derive the maximum benefits from delegation and help scale up your business:

Make delegation a company value

Delegation needs to go beyond just you when you’re looking at scaling a business. Yes, you need to let go of control. But so do the other leaders in your various departments. 

Bottlenecks inhibit growth. Delegation is how you eliminate bottlenecks. Even if you buy into this, you need your other leaders and managers to get it too, or you’ll just have more bottlenecks in the way in more places. 

By making it part of your company’s culture and talking about it as such, you’ll create a culture of delegation. Employees will learn to differentiate between things they need to take care of and that are a good use of their time, and things they can justifiably pass off to someone else.

Empower employees

The most critical component of delegation is to empower your employees. What does this mean? It means you give them charge of a task, including the room to fail at it the first few times. 

Are you the one who always contacts a particular vendor to place new orders? Does it have to be you? Assign this task to an employee. Watch them do it the first time. Monitor their efforts from afar the next time. And then let them do it on their own from that point on. Might they make a mistake? It’s possible, but this is how you develop internal expertise. We learn by doing. 

Though routine to you, new tasks will be fresh and feel more important to the employees they’re delegated to. As a result, employees may even discover new improvements or processes you’ve long looked past. Mixing up roles is a proven way to keep employees alert and smooth out operations all-around.

Empowered employees find ways to do things better. They, in turn, may also delegate to other employees, contractors, or temp workers.

Empowered employees thrive and grow and become leaders. Bottlenecked employees just do what they’re told and wait for approval for everything. 

Make smart and targeted new hires

A report by McKinsey found that high-performing employees are 400% more productive than average employees. 

Of course, we all know it’s best to hire top performers. Finding them is a bit more tricky. Nevertheless, this needs to be your aim, because hiring poorly can cause terrible delays and setbacks in your efforts to scale. 

You want people who can work independently, who regularly learn and gain skills, focus on continuous improvement, who care about the quality of their work, and who are driven to excel.

Remember the goal — can you leave your business for two weeks while continuing operations? When you hire high performers who want to develop their own leadership skills, the answer is an easy yes. 

Onboard and train according to your values

Infuse your onboarding process with your company’s values. This is how we think about our position in the marketplace. This is how we serve customers. This is how our employees work and get treated. This is what we do with customer data. Company values aren’t just about how employees treat each other, though that’s part of it. Values are also about how you do business. 

For example, which do you value more — long-term customer value or having more customers? Meaning, do you pursue ways to increase customer loyalty and repeat business, or do you focus more on making more sales to more new customers. Either approach can be valid depending on the business. Sometimes, you can do both. 

But this is a company value that affects your marketing, customer service, data management, and other areas of business. And delegation, as mentioned already, can also be a company value.

When you onboard new employees, you instill in each team member the way you do business so they replicate the core of what makes your company work, even as you grow.

Company culture begins in the hiring and onboarding process. 

And after onboarding comes training. They won’t do it perfectly the first time, and that’s okay. Monitor your team’s performance. Step in as needed, then give them room to grow. You’re investing in the development of someone who can take a process and run with it, so you no longer have to. 

The more people you have who can handle tasks, processes, and initiatives, the more it frees you up to maintain focus on the bigger components of scaling a business.

Develop relationships with vendors and suppliers

Delegation also affects your vendors and suppliers, and how you manage your relationships with them. 

For example, maybe you have a good arrangement with one vendor, but you know it would be smart to communicate with them more often. It’s just another task, and it often gets pushed down the priority list. With delegation, you can assign vendor relations to an employee who will make reaching out to your vendors part of their regular routine. 

You can also sometimes delegate tasks directly to your vendors and suppliers. Maybe there are things you’re doing now that you can get them to do for you. Maybe this increases your costs a tiny bit, but if it saves time and lets you streamline processes, maybe that cost is worth it. 

Review, refine, repeat

As organizations grow, systems do too. Checks and balances are added. A chain of command is often set up. Roles are duplicated and roles are duplicated to oversee the duplicated roles. 

As a high-level executive of an expanding operation, it’s up to you to identify redundancies, inefficient processes, bloated departments, and overall poor operations. 

You’ll need to continuously review these things, run experiments, and then refine tools, procedures, and human resources on a regular basis. Otherwise, organizational waste will grow at such a compounding rate that scaling only serves to make you less and less profitable. 

When it comes to rapid growth, you’ve already seen that this will require a team effort, technology, and outside expertise. 

When it comes to technology, WooCommerce offers a wide array of tools and resources for online businesses of all sizes. From payment processing to marketing to accounting to automation and more, you can leverage many of our numerous extensions to make your online store work better, smarter, and harder. 

How does WooCommerce help you scale? First of all, its open-source nature means that you or your team can make absolutely any change you need to your site. Edit source code to build new functionality, choose the perfect dedicated host, and create the exact tech stack that you need.

It’s also infinitely flexible. You can choose from a vast library of extensions to add functionality to your store. And there are absolutely no limits on visitors, sales, products, or variations. You aren’t penalized by your ecommerce tool as you grow.

See how you can scale with WooCommerce and get to know stores who have already done so successfully. 

Existing or soon-to-be enterprise stores are finding success. Learn more about WooCommerce as an enterprise ecommerce platform.

About

Kathryn Marr