20 Ideas for Scaling Your Business
Scaling your business is all about adopting new habits, upgrading processes and paying attention to – and believing in — your own success.
Here are twenty-one proven tips to help you on that journey.
Use your Style Guides and Flowcharts to Measure Quality
Scaling your business requires consistency, simplicity and (paradoxically) sophistication. Give your visitors and clients this feeling by creating and using your style guides and flowcharts to ensure consistency in all your marketing platforms.
Create a New Facebook Page
An especially good strategy if you are rebranding or relaunching a signature program. Give it the signature program’s name and invite all the current members of your other pages or groups, as well as other strategic potential followers.
Create a Livestream Event
Scaling your business can about people knowing YOU. You can do this by creating a Livestream Event. Finish by inviting them to take action such as:
Join the new group you’re forming; check out your new program; get your latest new free gift, etc…
Use the Expertise of Others as Leverage
Arrange an interview or guest post from an expert your subscribers follow and admire. Be a be guest on a fellow expert’s podcast, or write a post or article to be featured on their media. Most effective of all, see if you can entice a fellow expert to appear on a Livestream with you.
Provide and Encourage the Use of Checklists
Make it a part of your team process that your team members not only use your guides and guidelines, but also checklists, to ensure there are zero omissions and mistakes.
Use Content Reviewers
Assign a team member – preferably a copy editor or VA experienced in content writing – to read through all your new content. This is not only to catch mistakes, but also to make sure it reads fluidly and clearly to others. As in the world of Olympic-level athletes, sometimes the smallest tweaks they’ll be able to suggest can make a world of difference to your content quality and its perceived value.
Allow for Your Ideal Client’s Journey
A mistake entrepreneurs and coaches often make when scaling up is operating under the assumption that all their new client targets have the same pain point. Find the pain points for key stages of your ideal client’s journey and create offers designed to solve these minor pain points. Then keep your ideal client moving through your funnel. Remember, a client’s journey is a process; not just a destination.
Learn to Under-schedule
Chaos and workaholism spawns from perfectionism, believe it or not. People take on too much or push themselves toward impossible deadlines.
Don’t just focus on simplifying your business and targeting your branding. Use this process to also teach yourself to under-schedule. Decide how long something is going to take you to complete and multiply that by three. Dispose of other tasks to accommodate that time frame. Outsource them, delegate them, automate them or discard them.
If you can learn the value of under-scheduling your time, you’ll soon find you actually HAVE time for the things YOU want to do.
Take the Time to Hire the Right People
If your company is just you, it will stay small and be limited by your limitations and tunnel-vision. Creating a dream team of others with expertise you can lever adds value to your business. Take the time to check references, interview, try out and build a strong working relationship with the right people. There are millions of contractors out there, but there are only a few who are going to “click” with your business and help you in scaling your business in an enjoyable way.
Therefore, take your time with the process of finding the right person. When you do find them, make sure they will want to stay, and appreciate them as not just someone you pay to do a task, but as a vital member of your team who helps you keep your clients happy.
Remember, your business is as good as your team.
Provide Over-the-Top Client Care
No, this doesn’t mean you have to be at their beck and call, but do set in place top-level customer care, to go along with your upscaled business and clientele. Top-level clients expect instant service for the VIP prices they pay, so before you do anything else, arrange for clear communication on how they can get help.
Set up a reliable Help Desk with Live Chat. Assign an experienced Customer Care VA specifically to serve as your client care liaison. Provide clear FAQs, tutorial videos, guides and instructions. Above all, let them know how, when and where you will personally be available for their questions.
Find Trigger Words that Work for Your New Upscaled Market
Test and do your research on keywords that seem to bring the highest engagement and/or conversions. Make a lot of these. Be aware of them and use them in your content, whenever there is a natural opportunity to do so.
Be the Captain, Not the Crew
Let go of the details: Especially if you have always been someone who is very hands-on. Even more so if, up till now, you have attempted to do everything yourself. Step back, and concentrate on the overview rather than on the details. Focus on what keeps scaling your business. Not on what single task you can get absorbed in today.
Make Sure Your Business Runs Full-Steam-Ahead Without You
If your business grinds to a halt because you’re sick for a day, you’re thinking too small. Make sure that things can run just fine without you: That you have assigned people to take over if you’re not available. Be sure they know what to do, and are capable of doing it.
One more priceless bonus: When your company can run without you, you’ll really have time for self-care!
Get Quality Sleep by Banishing Your Mobile
When one is building a business, sleep is often the second thing to go (after free time and relationships). Talk to any top celebrity entrepreneur, and you’ll likely discover that a good night’s sleep is sacred to them. They know that making sharp decisions and being at the top of their game depends on having a great night’s sleep.
So, put your mobile in another room when you go to bed, so you’re not tempted to check it if you wake up. Turn the lights out. Go to bed at the same time — all the same problems and joys will still be there tomorrow. Buy a top-quality mattress and pillow. Make your bedroom a place of peace and order – and use dark blinds or curtains. Use an eye-mask like Jennifer Aniston in all those TV commercials. Use a diffuser to scent your room gently with lavender or chamomile.
Focus on Relationships and Retention
It’s not enough to create awesome new offers. You need to keep your new customers or clients engaged, and coming back for more. Recognize that investing in the relationship is the core to business success – at any level. Never lose sight of opportunities to help, serve and enjoy your subscribers and clients.
Practice Perseverance
Use each “failure” as a learning tool. Be grateful for the lessons it teaches you. It is will show you the “holes.” Yet, it will also show you how much you are moving forward. So, don’t beat yourself up. Recover, and keep scaling your business. You WILL get there.
As Sir James Dyson (inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner) says, “You never learn from success, but you do learn from failure.”
Find the Strengths in Your Weaknesses
We all have weaknesses in business and in life. Instead of beating yourself up about them, see what they can teach you and use them to help you in scaling your business. For example, if you find a great solution, share that in your business content. Recognize that the weaknesses you have are often likely to be the secret fears of your clients. The fact you embrace and conquer those weaknesses makes you even more of an expert – and someone to follow.
Use Milestones Strategically
A word that people often gloss over or take for granted is “milestone”, but what does a milestone actually do in real life?
A milestone is not a warm, fuzzy feeling. A physical milestone along a route is a factual indication that you are moving toward a specific destination. You are one mile closer to London, or wherever you are heading. It’s an indicator and affirmation that you’re on the right road and making progress.
So, identify changes, implementations and events that MUST happen this year for your business to scale up successfully. Set these as milestones, give them the respect – and significance – they are due, and actively and steadily work toward them.
Be Choosy
When other experts first seek you out and offer you JV opportunities, it can be a heady feeling! But right from the beginning, keep your focus on your brand, and turn down opportunities that confuse your brand presence in the public eye.
Keep your focus on what you are passionate about and what your clients really need, and you will automatically build a sterling reputation for exactly what you are aiming for.
Keep on Systematizing
Running a flawless business is all about repeatable processes. Don’t just systematize once. Using a system like Coach’s Harbor will keep your business purring along like a well-fed kitten.
Scaling your business to the next level takes perseverance, courage, and above all, action. Start putting these tips to work for you today!
