When it comes to scaling your business, there is a lot more that needs to go into the process than simply expanding without any forethought. If your business can’t handle increased capacity in any way, you will find yourself bucking under pressure and potentially doing more harm than good.
Instead of rushing to ensure you are the first out of the blocks, you should put some thought and effort into increasing capability within your business and ensuring you have the right frameworks in place.
Ensure Your Systems Can Cope
If you are looking to expand what you do and how you do it, you need to ensure your systems are able to cope with the increased demand and pressure, from working with companies to installing data centre ups to avoid downtime and loss of performance to upgrading internal IT systems, technology and more ready for your go-live date. This can help to reduce any issues or downtime.
Employee Focus
Can your employees cope with the demands on them now, and will they have the time to increase their workloads reasonably? If not, you must look at hiring more staff or redistributing workloads. On top of this, you should ensure everyone is fully trained and up to speed with new product or service developments or expectations regarding service and work etiquette so they can back you up when you need it and are fully equipped with everything they will need for this new phase in your company’s progress.
Physical Location
If you are carrying inventory, welcoming customers or clients on site, do you have the room to meet your current demands and easily hold more people on the premises? While you might be technically ready if your physical location might struggle with demand will hinder your ability to move forward should you proceed without ensuring you can accommodate the volume of visitors you might be anticipating. It can be worth looking at relocating, opening a second location or expanding your premises prior to rolling out the new launch to ensure you are ready to handle expected demand.
Marketing
Lastly, with any expansion plans, new product or service launches or anything that will propel your business forward, you need to have a solid marketing plan in place before your launch. Be it emails for lead generation, signing up to a waiting list, accepting pre-orders or hosting live events to generate buzz. Get people aware of your new plans and push out a marketing campaign to ensure everyone who needs to know does. Send out newsletters, share on social media, utilise traditional marketing methods or head out and about within your industry or local community to reach potential prospects and ensure you have the right level of interest for when the time does come.
Enhance Your Offerings
When scaling your business, increasing your offerings or improving your products and services is a great way to make this transition smooth and worthwhile. Not only does this make customers more willing to purchase your products and services, but it also boosts your company’s reputation and will result in more repeat customers and word-of-mouth marketing. There are many ways you can improve your products and services. For example, if you work within the pharmaceutical industry, adding things such as a blister pack pharmacy with the medications can be a great way to upgrade them.
Conclusion
When it comes to expanding your business, you need to ensure you have put the time and effort into not only ensuring what you are offering is viable and ready for the market but that you can physically accommodate your expansion plans. It isn’t enough to simply bring something new to your market; you need to be able to back it up with the same level of service and expertise as current customers are used to having. Without this, not only will your expansion not be supported, but you could affect your existing operations by negatively impacting all areas.
