If an entrepreneur is preparing to scale up his startup business, he must first of all identify the best time to scale up the startup.is is difficult to know when and how to scale a startup .scaling up requires a greater investment of both time and resources. If you are already at this stage, scaling up usually means hiring more employees, increasing marketing spending, or investing more capital into your products or the services it’s self.
Some of the signs that always indicate that startup is ready to scale up include
- An accomplished settled team
- Proven track record of hitting milestones
- Strong financial position
- Capable IT infrastructure
After a startup has noticed this this signs that shows that it has to scale up its business, the startup goes ahead to choose a startup scaling strategy. There’s actually no single way of scaling up a business. Below are the strategies of how to scale up a business
- MOVE TO THE NEXT ROUND OF FUNDING.
If your business has followed the traditional series of funding thus far, den it may be time to move on and seek your next round of funding. Prepare by creating a concise pitch deck and get your financial statements and other related documents in order. You can always expect to face tough questions from investors who are going to want a retain on their money. However don’t just tell investors what they want to hear, make sure you are honest about your plans of expansion, any current or future profitability and when investors can expect to get a return on their investment.
- DEPLOY A NEW MARKETING STRATEGY.
One of the most effective strategies of how to scale up a business is to tell more people about it .creating a fresh, bold and impactful marketing campaign can transform your business overnight. Thanks to viral nature of social media, one video can drastically impact the number of sales and orders you receive.do your own research on what type of marketing strategy would best fit for your startup. Some options may ninclude
- Creating engaging and valuable content
- Paid advertisement
- Video blogs and guides
- Direct marketing.
- INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY
Another popular startup scaling strategy commonly used to scale and expand a startup is to invest further into technology and infrastructure used by your company. By improving your current technology offering, or transitioning to a more modern and scalable IT infrastructure you can serve your customers more effectively .having a robust and reliable infrastructure in place will help retain existing customers and clients while attracting new ones.
- LAUNCH AN ASSOCIATED PRODUCT AND SERVICE
To facilitate the growth of your startup, launch a complimentary product or service that will expand your business offering. Let’s consider a startup that creates a tool that accepts pdf files .To scale up, the startup decides to invest further in its business and expand the current tool to accept doc.(Microsoft word) files. Or a company
Offering graphics design services decide to launch an academy that trains more professional graphics designers to further expand its business
- CONSIDER HIRING EXPERIENCED MANAGEMENT
As the leader of your startup, you are clearly talented in many different areas of business; however, no body is perfect. Sometimes seeking outside help in the form of an experienced, more objective management professional can be beneficial for your startup. Having an experienced manager in your corner, especially one with previous experience in successfully scaling startups can transform your business into a more robust and organized company.
- MAKE THE STARTUP RUN WITHOUT YOU
The ultimate goal of any startup is that is to become a reputable, successful, and sustainable business for years.as the leader of your business, you have the responsibility to ensure that the business can run smoothly in your absence. If you sold your startup and were no longer in charge of the day to day operations, would your startup survive without you?.
