Starting a small business takes a lot. It is a leap of faith in yourself, your abilities, and the market. There is a tremendous amount of resources available to individuals looking to take that leap, including books, videos, conferences, and seminars. But what happens next? Your business is ticking along nicely, you have a scalable business model, and you are ready to take on more of a challenge. In essence: you are ready to scale up. Introducing the ScaleUp Method!
Here is our overview of The ScaleUp Method —a general technique that any small business can adopt to help grow operations successfully and fluidly.
ScaleUp: Increasing Your Reach
The very first thing you need to think about when it comes to scaling a company is broadening your reach. What does this mean? Well, in the modern environment, it means reaching more people online –even if your business is wholly brick and mortar. While in the past (way, way, in the past), you could rely on foot traffic, word–of–mouth, print media, and maybe billboards to spread awareness of your brand, now you have to lean into digital alternatives.
A proven way of making this happen is to share something interesting, engaging, or thought–provoking to your audience on one channel and close it out with a link to ‘more of the same,’ ‘a deeper dive,’ or ‘part two’ on another channel.
ScaleUp: Content Is Currency
When you share something engaging, interesting, or thought–provoking, this is known as your content in digital marketing. Everything you post: words, audio, animation, video, promotions, blogs, status updates, these are all content.
The key to effective content is it needs to speak to your audience. Users will not engage with it if they do not find it helpful or at least entertaining on a personal level. If they do not engage with it, they are not an active participant in your brand, and you risk losing them.
ScaleUp: Sign–Up to the Sales Funnel
When your target users are following your social or business profiles, you may consider them at the very start of your sales funnel—and to a certain extent, this may be true. To get your audience officially part of your funnel, you need them to take action. That is typically a sign–up to your email list, and obviously, this is not something that can be done passively by your audience.
Your content should be consistently geared toward that goal —not making a sale, but just signing people up. Use CTAs (call to action) on your content that are carefully designed to lead your readers/viewers to decide for themselves that they want you to email them. You can also accelerate this process through giveaways or competitions.
From there, it is time to automate your email funnel. Use tools like Hyros or Mailchimp to achieve this.
ScaleUp: Scale Out?
So by now, you not only have a larger audience, but they are also more engaged with your brand. Your scale of operation should be growing organically. Great news! Now you can start to move laterally —add in eCommerce where possible and think about utilizing affiliate linking as an additional revenue stream.
ScaleUp: Invest, Automate, Measure
You must continually repeat the steps to keep scaling your business using these techniques. Ultimately, that will be unsustainable for you to do alone, so you will need to invest in technology. Whether something as simple as a piece of software that allows you to publish and engage from one pane of glass or a custom automation tool, you will ultimately find it invaluable. Be sure to document each step of your processes (no matter how seemingly insignificant or ‘obvious’) as you and your team will need to refer to the processes repeatedly.
Of course, ultimately, you need to know how you are performing. As with any other part of your operations, implement achievable but ambitious KPIs to ensure that your activities are performing as you require –and make changes where necessary.
Ultimately, you can never know if you are making the right moves unless you have the factual information to hand —then, you can make informed, data–driven decisions every time.
What Next?
For more info on The ScaleUp Method or general guidance and assistance on scaling your business, check out Small Business Hunters. We are a group of experienced business operators who have guided many companies from nothing to six and seven figures. We love to share our successes (and failures!) with other like–minded business owners.
