Scaling has become a common term today with proliferation of the startup ecosystems.  Simply put, ‘scaling a business’ refers to increasing the business either by increasing its size, revenues, or customer base. 

It’s a goal that many founders and investors strive for, though sustainable scaling is not easy to achieve. You may burn the investors money on marketing channels, but will struggle with conversion. If the conversion is correct, you may struggle with Operations and Support. If you get that right, profitability becomes a problem. 

In fact, learning how to scale a business is the single biggest thing successful founders focus on.

In my experience,  I have seen founders constantly juggling different objectives, yet not able to scale the business the way they want to. They constantly feel that they are not productive enough.

Worse still, most of the time, people keep running after un-scalable and vanity objectives that won’t even serve their business in the long run.

Achieving scalability requires careful planning and implementation of the right strategies. 

But what are the elements you should tie in these strategies with ? 

I have recognized five things that can scale in business and how to set them for scaling.

Let’s have a look at each one of them: 

Hire an A-team to build scalability in business

The first of these is hiring. Without a great team, a business cannot scale. The founders keep getting engaged in petty activities, and to relieve their bandwidth, it is necessary to get people with a founder’s mindset and ownership. 

Identifying the right candidates – Build an A-Team to scale your business

To successfully scale through hiring, businesses need to be able to identify and attract the right candidates for the job. 

The most important factor here is to focus on building what we can call an A-Team. If you get a leader with insane ownership and delivery capacity, the team below him/her will acquire the same traits and within no time you will find a large group with founder like qualities. 

Set up the hiring and tracking process

Once you have established success in getting right candidates who perform on the job, create a systematic process for recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding. 

Additionally, it’s important to have a tracking system to allow easy monitoring of new hires and their performance.

Train your people well to scale your business 

Second, founders need to focus on training. Training is highly scalable and one of the most important elements of a successful organization. 

Training is the Boss’s Job.

Andy Groove , High Output Management

How to develop Effective training programs

There may be many approaches to training, however, what I have seen working is benchmark the techniques of your top performer to build training structures. 

To be able to scale, it’s necessary to identify any knowledge gaps among your top performers and develop training programs to fill those gaps. 

Track the effectiveness of training to build scalability in business

Additionally, businesses need to have a system in place to assess the effectiveness of the training and make any necessary adjustments. Training programs need to have clear deliverables. Generalised training programs are more like work breaks. 

In my stint at various startups, I used to design training programs with the following characteristics: 

• Led by the top performers ( top sales baggers) 
• Based on actual and relevant business data ( sales calls in this context)  
• Had clear deliverables  (Revenue or conversion changes were measured 1 month pre- and post-training)

Use Technology to scale your business

Third, it’s important to invest in technology solutions that make it easier to scale. 

This includes identifying any technologies that can help streamline operations, such as automation and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. 

Implementing these solutions can help businesses increase efficiency and reduce costs, which can lead to greater scalability.

When I joined one of the top EdTech Ventures of India as VP Sales, I observed that : 

• Revenues and orders were growing
• Payment systems were broken and inefficient
• End of Day sales figures were not clear
• Calls were not being tracked leading to low accountability

Though my targets were aligned to revenues and growth, I dedicated the next 1-2 months for implementing a seamless CRM, having a single source of truth of data, fixing the payments systems, and implementing better telephony and call tracking systems – all through technology. 

Post this implementation, my sales people were able to focus on what they did best – Sell ! 

Robust Organizational Structures to scale your business for growth

Fourth, businesses constantly evolve their organizational structures and set clear roles and responsibilities at each level. 

As a general rule of thumb, every time your business doubles in revenue, you need to revamp your organizational structure. The responsibility of thinking about the structure lies on the founder and top leadership.

A good structure ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals and that resources are allocated effectively. In an ideal org structure, the manager’s span is not more than 6 to 8 reportees. 

Additionally, it’s important to have a system in place to monitor the performance of the structure and make any necessary changes.

A good structure can scale insanely. You just need to hire, promote, and make a parallel structure and your business expands within no time. 

Systems

Lastly, businesses need to focus on their systems. 

Identify gaps in existing systems and fix them

This includes identifying any processes that can be streamlined and establishing systems to monitor performance. An example is the payment process that I mentioned above, that I had to fix to get to the right sales figures. 

Build additional systems for processes that grow with business growth

In most companies, processes such as hiring, training, sales processes, support processes, grow directly with the business growth. Founders and top managers need to keep an eye on such processes and build systems and rules to ensure they do not break. 

Additionally, businesses should look at automating some of their systems to make them more efficient and reduce the need for manual labor.

By taking the time to properly set these five things up, businesses can gain a competitive edge and start scaling their operations.