Taking the big next step in launching your business to the greater public is an exciting and equally terrifying prospect. If your current business is performing well and hitting all its required KPIs, then it’s a natural progression to look outward and increase the floor on which it operates.
That being said, simply making the decision to scale won’t cut it. You need to have the right tool stack and technology to help you sustain the demands of a bigger and more complex market.
If you scale faster than you can handle, your business operations could suffer, and you could crash and burn as a result, tarnishing the reputation you’ve built up for your business in the process.
The good news is that there are ways you can sustainably grow and control your business’s growth in a way that’s manageable for you and satisfactory for your customers’ demands. It all starts by implementing the right infrastructure to handle this outlook to scale.
This begs the question: what are the necessary tools that one must have in their business to scale sustainably? If you want an answer to that question, then you’re in the right place.
This article will help provide you with ways you can accelerate growth within your company in a sustainable and controlled manner. Let’s jump right into it.
1. Implementing Scalable Communication Tools
As your business grows and its reach expands, you’ll inevitably experience a surge of customer inquiries.
Having a single telephone line or personal phone number handle all these queries limits your company to just entertaining one caller at a time, leaving many potential customers unreachable and contributing to a lacklustre customer experience overall.
Businesses that wish to scale should integrate dedicated business communication tools to meet customer demands. In particular, Australian companies should get inbound business numbers like 1300 or 13 numbers to increase their call answer rate during their operations. Read the difference between 1300 and 13 numbers by Telcoworks for more information on the matter.
Getting a dedicated phone number not only ensures that every caller will have a corresponding agent who can respond to their call, but it also brings new features to the table that can help your operations, such as a suite of KPI metrics in an all-in-one dashboard. There are also a few quality-of-life improvements that both callers and your team can appreciate, like customisable IVR menus for faster processing and voice recording for enhanced security and operation training resources.
By implementing the right communication technologies into your everyday operations, you’ll be better equipped to handle more customer callers. That said, subscribing to the right calling plan and hiring the right number of support agents is essential to harnessing the full benefits of this tool, so be sure to align all these aspects to maximise its effectiveness.
2. Establishing a Scalable Fulfilment System
If your business is starting to feel the strain of operational impact and supply chain woes, then it’s about time to reinvent your fulfilment system to account for the demands that your business is facing.
Your inventory management system is a crucial component that has broad implications for your business’s entire operational flow. If it’s too slow or unoptimised, this can mean higher overhead costs as inventory sits longer in places that accrue cost per day spent.
You may also encounter other problems, like running out of inventory stock unexpectedly or delivering orders late—both of which can impact your business’s reputation and customer satisfaction drastically.
The solution to this is to revitalise and repair your fulfilment system to account for this growing demand. This may mean opting to subscribe to inventory management software that can track orders and alert you when stock reaches a point where it needs a reorder.
Many inventory software systems can also automate stock trading and use a barcode system to create more efficient warehouse operations.
These systems can handle thousands of orders and an inventory of large scale, empowering small-to-medium-sized enterprises to scale without having to worry about increased labour hours and manual tracking getting in the way of their business scaling.
3. Strengthening Your Financial Systems
If you don’t want to have your financial reports in disarray, then it’s crucial to invest in the right financial tools to ensure that your bookkeeping operations are properly tracked in your ledgers.
As you scale, it’s natural for money to flow in and out faster than you can track it. With a rudimentary financial system, you could find yourself having great difficulty tallying all your transactions or balancing all the accounting entries in your system.
This can have bad implications for your overall business, as you won’t be able to clearly see your financial inflows and outflows. This could spill over to your operations as you may take wrong actions hinged on inaccurate assumptions about your actual financial health, like allocating a high budget for acquisition or signing an unnecessary loan deal and accumulating debt in the process.
As this is the case, it’s essential to have the right financial infrastructure to ensure that your reports are as accurate and comprehensive as possible. There are multiple ways to do that, but the best way is to invest in a professional team that is capable of handling accounting software tools like QuickBooks.
It’s also important to create frameworks and templates for the finance team to follow for consistency across every horizontal. Listening to your finance team is also ideal, as they are the ones who are knee-deep in reports and can help you see potential cracks in the budget that could be corrected with proper action.
In any case, it’s important to take the financial operations of your business seriously, as even small inefficiencies can have vast ramifications on your overall business health as it starts ramping up its operations.
4. Refresh The Organisational Structure
One final aspect of the business that’s pivotal in influencing the scalability of the business is its organisational structure. Small businesses can usually get away with lean organisational models with one point person per department.
However, as the business starts to scale, more responsibilities tend to pile up, and more work needs to be done quickly and properly. This would naturally call for a restructuring process as more roles need to be introduced to improve accountability and workflow.
In such cases, hiring and training your team to focus on key areas of the business—like supply chain and finance—ensures that there’s someone whose function is all about ensuring that that specific function of the business is running smoothly and properly.
If you fail to properly organise your team and staff, this could cause your staff to take on roles that are not suited to them. This could lead to burnout, confusion, a lack of accountability, and an overall mishandling of the operations—something that could be painstakingly hard to deal with as your business is experiencing a rise in demand.
By structuring the organisational structure to match demand, you’ll be able to assign proper leaders across teams and ensure that your business has the capacity to handle each area of the business. It’ll also mean you can delegate the less important roles to your staff, freeing up your own time to deal with more executive matters.
We hope that we’ve helped you understand the importance of setting up the right business infrastructure to keep your business running smoothly at scale. All the best in navigating your growing business!
