Don’t Want Your Small Business To Stay Small? You Need To Learn To Scale Your Growth!
Small businesses really are wonderful. They’re not only good for the economy, they’re the very embodiment of the American dream. They enable normal men and women to liberate themselves from careers that don’t afford them the mobility that they deserve or jobs where their talents are allowed to go to waste. By setting up their own small business, people can embrace the autonomy of entrepreneurship and reap the rewards. The small business is the backbone of the economy representing 99% of employment firms. Conservatives love small businesses, liberals love small businesses. Everyone loves small businesses. But when a small business operates successfully, it can outgrow its infrastructure and growth is inevitable. Fortunately, you can still bring the individualized customer care, passion and sensibility of your small business even as it grows. If Steve Jobs has taught us anything it’s that business expansion needn’t come at the expense of ideology.
However, if you simply allow your business to grow without implementing the infrastructure to support that growth, your business could become an unwieldy leviathan that collapses under its own weight. Likewise, over-investing in said infrastructure can strangle your cash flow and actually impede growth rather than facilitating it!
Here are some tips for scaling your growth seamlessly without impeding the customer experience.
Invest in a VPS
Server hosting is the backbone of your business. It’s what keeps your website running seamlessly, supports a responsive and pleasant user experience and helps to convert new prospects into repeat customers. If your business has outgrown the cloud based server that it started with but you’re not yet ready to invest in a dedicated physical server of your own, a cheap VPS is a great intermediary solution. It’s affordable, versatile and can be scaled in direct correlation to your growth so that not a penny is wasted on unnecessary overheads.
Add value to each and every transaction
Every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare is investing in the growth of their business and finding to their chagrin that their business does not receive the influx of customers to support that growth. To ensure that customers stay loyal and to increase the perceived value of your brand, it behoves you to build value into each and every transaction.
Customers tend to be happy to pay more if they perceive that they are getting their money’s worth. The more substantial your margin, the greater your propensity for a healthy cash flow. How you choose to do this is up to you, but here are some ideas to get you started.
Beware complexity traps
Both entrepreneurs, employees and their customers value simplicity. Your customers have enough on their minds without your growth altering or complicating the experience that they have come to take for granted. Likewise, your employees are rendered less effective if your growth requires them to adopt new and more complicated processes. Before implementing decisions, take the time to look for complexity traps which could alter or impede the customer experience and work collaboratively with your employees to find ways to overcome them.
There are plethora of ways in which you can scale up your growth… But when you don’t scale your growth it’s like climbing a ladder that you’re building as you go along!