The Fred Auzenne Guide to Scaling a Small Business

Every entrepreneur dreams of making his dream business large and successful in the shortest possible time says Fred Auzenne. However, rocketing growth is only possible if you take the time out to plan and focus on the big picture. More often than not, entrepreneurs get busy with the daily grind and forget to plan for growth. If you want to grow your business, you need to develop a plan to scale it rapidly and sustainably.

What Is a Scalable Business?

Scaling a business means growing it steadily as fast as possible, and at a pace, you can sustain. You can deem a business as scalable if it can handle steady growth of customer demand without a drastic increase in expenses to meet the demand. The scalability of a business depends, to a large extent, on the kind of business. For example, a SaaS business can easily add more servers to ramp up its operations, a manufacturer will require more time to expand its production line, while a consultancy company may find it difficult to find enough time to accommodate other clients.

Whether the business is ready for scaling also depends on how stable its cash flow is and how well it is entrenched in the market. Since scaling up a business requires considerable effort, time, and money, entrepreneurs must decide whether their businesses are ready for rapid expansion. Some of the top methods of scaling your business include:

Develop Your Business Model

If you have acquired a reputation for good quality products and services, you can cash in on your goodwill by extending your product range that also delivers the same customer delight. Ideally, you should offer products in the same family as your current range for better acceptance.

Strike Up Partnerships

Scaling up does not have to mean that you do everything, observes Fred Auzenne. You can get good, if not better, results by entering into strategic partnerships with other businesses to win over more customers. For example, if you have a bakery, you can team up with a wedding planner to rack up more sales.

Augment Your Workforce

When you scale up your business to cater to increased volumes, you will need to ramp up your facilities and hire more people. When you are hiring people, it is important to identify people who have the skillsets you do not have, so you have all-round expertise.

Embrace Automation 

Since there is no point in engaging valuable resources in repetitive tasks, you can automate processes that do not benefit from manual intervention. Many internal processes and operations of a business, like payroll, accounting, vendor payments, etc. It can be easily automated, saving time better employed in other areas.

Conclusion 

Scaling your business requires a lot of attention and commitment to details. You must aggressively expand brand reach and boost engagement while taking care not to grow too rapidly. You must also preserve your brand image by not chasing too many revenue streams. And paying attention to the integrity of the company’s work culture. Arranging for adequate funding is critical, as is updating the business plan.