As the owner of a growing business, you have to agree that scaling is challenging. It takes a lot of effort, but it also means you need to learn how to wear different hats. One day, you could be solving an issue with the sales team, and the next minute, you need to sort out some supply chain issues.
To complicate matters, you also need to have a good grasp of your local tax and compliance laws. So yes, it is hard and does take a toll on you. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t tips that make it much easier to quickly grow your brand.
So, if you are ready to buckle down and put in the work, here are four tips that help improve your small business and ensure you scale up rapidly.
1- Set Up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
As your business grows, tracking transactions by yourself is cumbersome. The volume of transactions becomes too much for one human to manage. You also lose the power of insight that comes from analyzing your sales data.
One way to overcome this is to buy a CRM. There are many useful business apps on the market, depending on which section of your business you’ll direct your focus. You could get an accounting CRM to help you with invoicing, expenses, and stock count, or you could get a sales and marketing option to help you track your orders.
Pro Tip: Ensure it’s a cloud-based solution for enhanced scalability.
2- Track & Manage Your Cash Flow
For a growing business, cash is king. Managing your cash flow is essential to your survival and growth, but you can’t manage what you don’t track. To help with tracking and managing this element of your business, try the following steps:
- Monitor and optimize your expenses.
- Track the number of days it takes you to collect a debt and adjust accordingly.
- Re-negotiate your payment terms with your suppliers.
- Track your stock levels to ensure you never stock out but also, at the same time, manage your warehouse cost.
Try these four steps, and you should be in a much better place, cash flow wise.
3- Launch a Customer Loyalty Program
Customer loyalty programs are a hack-tip for exponential growth. A well-run loyalty program can start delivering returns within the first week of operation. If you are wondering why they work so well, here’s the answer: Customer acquisition is costly. For a small business, that can be a drain on your precious resources. Loyalty programs keep your current customers buying from your company.
If we are putting numbers to your customer acquisition cost, marketing experts posit that it costs three times more to acquire a new customer than to sell to a current customer.
But that’s not the only reason you should explore setting up a customer loyalty program. Loyalty programs help you retain current customers, and you win over new ones without the attendant cost of customer acquisition. Take advantage of this tactic and watch your revenues soar.
Tip #4: Create Strategic Partnerships
The right sort of strategic partnership can deliver immediate short-term and long-term benefits to your business. These partnerships either give you access to capabilities or resources you lack or access to a new set of customers. To get the best out of this tactic, spend time researching companies that complement your product or service.
Once you identify one or more, reach out to them and propose bundling, up-sells, or cross-selling opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Scaling a small business can seem impossible. However, with the right tactics, such as the four mentioned above, you can be assured of a good start.
