Growing and scaling a business are not the same. Growing is linear and often means adding new resources such as workers or technology to your company in order to see an increase in revenue. Scaling your business means you’re able to handle increased sales and an overall increased workload without a vast increase of resources. Scaling means your company can handle rapid (or progressed) growth without suffering in any areas – from management to production.
The following highlights the key steps of ensuring your company is effectively ready to scale without comprising any important aspects of your business.
Assess the Risks
Like all great businesses, assessing the risks plays a huge part in directing your operations into a smooth path – resulting in healthy and stable growth. A risk is any event that negatively impacts your ability to achieve your business goals. Risks affect a company’s ability to survive and compete within the industry.
A risk assessment allows management to find the places where improvement is needed and implement new or more resources for its benefit. This process can make roles and responsibilities within your company more transparent as accountability becomes more prominent. For your risk assessment process to be successful, you must take as much time as you need to accurately maneuver the assessment as it can take several iterations before you have a complete picture of your company’s risks.
Identify Your Ideal Market
Identifying your ideal market (or customer) will take a lot of planning and dedicated time. However, this is one of the most crucial steps for operating your business successfully. Without identifying your market, you’re essentially going in blind and setting your business up for failure. Ensuring you know your ideal market allows for sustainable growth and returning customers.
Choosing a single market is better than multiple: Selling and distributing in too many groups can run your business thin and therefore, not make as many sales. Introducing too many variables makes it difficult to optimize for your target buyer. Knowing your ideal customer and being clear about your product message ensures profitability and scalability.
Optimizing Your Buyer
The more aware you are of the customer journey and how it affects your marketing approach, the better you’ll become at managing every phase of the purchase experience. Maintaining a positive relationship with customers is the goal of every business that aims for success. When customers feel that you’re treating them with respect along with great communication, they’re more likely to return to your business and make another purchase. Knowing how to put the customer first is an important attribute for anyone working in a customer-centric company.
A 3PL Can Help
A third-party logistics company like Simple Global can effectively manage your business’ expansion and growth while handling order volumes, managing your supply chain, and keeping up to date with your order fulfillment requirements.
Partnering with a trusted and reliable 3PL like Simple Global will allow you to utilize the best possible tools and assets necessary for scaling a supply chain. These include better shipping rates, faster shipping, and delivery, returns management, fulfillment warehouses, full-time support, real-time transparency, and full marketplace integration. These are only some of the services available to you when you partner with Simple Global. For more information, click here.
Conclusions
It will be a lengthy process to analyze the scalability of your business. By assessing the risks, specifying your ideal customer market and putting your customers first, you’ll be able to scale your business more effectively with less resources than going ahead with no plan at all. Putting your customers first through every action your company takes during the scaling process is difficult but can result in positive ripple effects. Once your product is out there, don’t stop asking questions. Ask your customers what they love or hate about it and use this knowledge to improve your business. Tweaking your ideas and plans as you go along is part of the process.
A 3PL like Simple Global can proactively scale and grow your business into new markets with the most cost-efficient methods. Recognizing the difficulties that scaling brings, an experienced and trusted 3PL like Simple Global has the resources you need to effectively scale your business. Click here to request a free quote today!
