The journey of thousand miles begins from the first step. Even reading this blog requires you to start with the first word. The same goes for startup journey, where you come up with an idea, brainstorm it and implement it. You can’t find any billion dollar company that grew overnight.
If you have taken the first step towards a long and challenging startup journey, greetings. However, that is not enough. Ask yourself, whether your business can grow to a million dollar company in the coming 5 years with the existing business model or no?
If your answer is no, you might need to think about scaling up your startup. However, don’t just rush when scaling up because most of the entrepreneurs fail due to premature scaling or they are not clear on what they want to achieve.
What is scale up all about might not be clear to many entrepreneurs, including you? Before we get you through the tips for growing your startup into a scale up, let’s first define it.
How Do You Define Scale Up?
According to some experts, scale-up is the next wave of innovation. In simple words, scale-up is a development stage of business, pertinent to high-end technology markets, market access, number of employees and increasing sales or services while cutting the cost of doing so.
The question is when do startups scale up?
Startups only scale up, when they validate their business models, overcome startup challenges and are ready for exponential growth.
Now that you have a clear picture of what scale up means for your startup, let’s have a look at how you can transition from startup to scaling up.
1. Restructure Your Organizational Roles
Startup journey starts with a few people who can takeover bunch of different roles to accomplish their goals. For instance, the key personnel may be engaged in various roles from simple data entry to the web and mobile app development.
However, when it comes to scaling up the business, now it is time to restructure your organization. What does restructuring mean? It’s a way to assign the tasks to the person with a specific set of skills. No matter how much hiring is required, you need to define the roles of every individual.
Some of the individuals can be held responsible for various roles simultaneously. No matter, whatever you do, make sure to spend the majority of your time on functional priorities.
2. Introduce Trainings through Mentors
Hiring mentors for the training purpose is the key to scaling up your business successfully. Investing in your team through training sessions can work as a fuel to scale up your startup. Before you hire a mentor for a training session, you should involve your team to write down their weak points. For instance, if a web designer is good at prototyping but not in user experience, it is time to invest in some training session.
Remember, as long as you invest in your team, the greater the chances of quality work that would be loved by clients. Imagine your team has some added skills that are needed often to fulfill client’s requirements. Would you like to see your company offering something that no one offers? By holding a training session, you can develop extra skills in your team that would pay off in the long-run.
3. Seek More Funding
According to Harvard Business Review, “the riskiest period for a growing business is not actually at startup but during the scaling for growth period”.
Financing and funding your startup is also a great way to scale up your business. As a startup, you are short of funds and need appropriate funding sources to scale it up. Bank loans and venture capitalist can be a useful source of capital.
Apart from looking into these options, you can consider multiple equity investors, risk sharing venture capital or employee stock options. If you are not comfortable with loans and capital funding, you should focus on upselling before the product is launched and target early adopters.
4. Develop Minimum Viable Product
Minimum Viable Product is yet another way to scale up your business while testing your idea. For instance, if your idea is to develop an app, you need to focus on the development of Minimum Viable Product.
By building an MVP, you will ensure that your idea is successful or not. MVP is the release of a product with minimum functionalities, without ignoring the core ones. For example, if you are hiring an MVP development company to develop an app for an e-commerce store, the core features will include checkout page, integrating products and social media following buttons.
MVP development will help you in verifying whether your idea is worthy or not. Moreover, how many customers are willing to buy your product? After the release of MVP app, you will better know what people are looking for and how you can improve to increase sales and revenue. Thus, it can help you lead your startup to scale up by adopting certain strategies that would work better and help in scaling up your startup.
5. Build Your Brand through Growth Hacking
The startup is all about building a strong customer relationship. You need to develop a positive brand image in the minds of the customers. This will help ensure that your customers will not leave you on the first hand without taking any actions.
As a startup, you also need to focus on growth hacking to gain early traction without spending much on marketing activities. For instance, you can write blogs about your product make videos, share on social media and so on. It will help you to gain early traction before the product is launched, resulting in more followers, leads, and prospects.
By doing so, you will not only be able to gain followers on a big scale but also help you, generate revenue and scale up your business.
Conclusion
As a startup, you have to focus on scaling up your business as soon as you start pursuing your startup idea. Without scaling your business, you might end up winding your business and giving the edge to competitors to take your place.
