3 Ways To Scale Up Your Business In 2015

By: Becky Wilcox

In 2014, you did all the right things and your business began to take off like a Harrier Jump Jet. However, now that you’ve been cruising at a high altitude for awhile, you can either choose to stay on course or go to a new level of elite performance.

How do you scale up your business? How do you do it without crashing and burning with too much new information and processes? How do you avoid over-stressing your infrastructure by using up more resources than you have available?

Here is a three point plan to enjoy the upside without the perils of the downside. First, upgrade your team. Second, upgrade your technology. And third, upgrade your market reach. By improving these three resources of management, information technology, and marketing, you will not only run your business better but also be able to take on more business.

Upgrade your team

While good advice is always a good thing, information is quite useless unless it is acted upon with a sense of purpose, mission, and dedication. Your management team is at the core of how you organize the information that you need to operate your business.

After the 2007-2008 financial crisis, often referred to as the Global Financial Crisis, companies across the world began to scale back on corporate training, denigrating it as “fluff.” They also downsized their staff and overworked their existing crew. While these lean measures did not help many companies survive, those that did began to run far more inefficiently.

Now, in 2015, it might be a time to get back into balance and work on harnessing the quality of services that your business provides to the marketplace by upgrading your management team. An educated, informed staff is essential to develop an innovative and progressive business plan.

Here are three ways to upgrade attitude, knowledge, and skills in your management team:

First, think about ways of company training to improve management practices, deepen business education, and nurture talent development.

Second, look ways of improving training, education, and development by using coaching, mentoring, training, education, and even gamification.

Third, decide on how much to budget for this task, what people need to learn to do better in your organization, and whether to conduct inhouse training or send them to training seminars.

Upgrade your technology

Now take a look at your machines. Review your current technology and think about what types of hi-tech tools you will need to do well in the future.

Do you have sufficient voice, data, and Internet solutions? Perhaps you do, but you are paying too much for too little, and can find a better supplier.

Do have adequate Internet security or is the fate of your entire network at risk because you are not prepared to deal with the increased flux of virulent malware in the year ahead. Trend Micro Security, a company with over 25 years of Internet security software experience, says that there are over 250 million threats a day and that fast web protection is needed to safeguard computers and networks from new internet threats.

Does your company spend a lot on IT but still use antiquated software because it can’t afford leading edge software? If so, look into using the cloud and renting out the best applications to optimize business performance.

Upgrade your market reach

How can you improve your marketing without spending more money on it?

Deploy content marketing strategies. This form of marketing is not only highly effective, but often performs far better than paid advertising because it adds a personal touch to marketing.

While you may already be doing content marketing, imagine what would happen if you decide to put more time into it.

Content marketing is time consuming: Blog posts have to be written, informative and informal videos have to be posted on video-sharing sites, and social media marketing updates have to be made. Naturally, all this takes times, but if you schedule in the time, it will pay back in spades.

How important is content marketing to your business?

Consider this analogy:

If you were researching a company that you planned to do business with and found that they had not updated their blog in months, done some videos but then never followed up on developing their themes, and took a scattered approach to offering relevant information on their social media platforms would you want to do business with them as a partner, vendor, or customer?

So, if you’re not running a robust content marketing plan, it’s important to schedule the time you need to get things up to par.

Summary

Scaling up your business is not easy, but it is totally worth doing. It can be done in a stable way by improving the quality of your people, improving the quality and safety of your technology, and improving how you connect with the marketplace.

By Becky Wilcox

Photo Businessman creating by shutterstock.com