9 Scalable Decisions that Will Grow Your Business
When growing your business, you’re constantly afraid of the future. Where will you find more people to hire? Where will you find the space for all these new people? Will your online presence keep up with your company’s expansion? How will you attract new customers without neglecting your loyal customer base? So, we came up with the top nine scalable decisions to help you handle these issues as they go.
1. Improvement of your delivery system
Your delivery system determines how quickly you’ll get from the order to the delivery of the product. Now, most smaller businesses are outsourcing this, while some are already on the dropshipping model; however, if you are handling this in-house, there are two things you need to focus on.
- Inventory management: This part is pivotal to your business capacities. Knowing when to restock and how to store best-selling items is the key to your organizational efficiency.
- Fleet management: Ensuring that your massive vehicles are not undergoing a long journey to deliver a small package is the way to run your delivery system efficiently. Controlling your drivers and picking the most efficient routes is vital to success.
Remember that you also want a simple checkout system (this journey starts before the item gets onto the truck/car).
2. Getting a CRM software
When you just start a business, you’ll have a few clients. This way, it won’t be hard for you to remember the essentials about them. Even then, you might mix things up and misremember some vital pieces of this puzzle. This is where some of the CRM tools that are available can be of use and help you avoid this problem.
With the right tool, you can provide exceptional customer service, manage your leads, and even get centralized customer-related data that you can use to craft a more efficient marketing campaign.
The most important part is that you also get the automation of many tasks, ranging from follow-up emails to scheduling an appointment. By delegating this to a platform, you can avert any accusation of bias.
3. Migrating to a hybrid/remote work model
While having an office gives you a feeling of being in the real workplace and may even play into your attempts to bolster team unity, the truth is that this is not necessarily as cost-effective as you think.
First, having an actual office and insisting that people work from the office drastically narrows down your hiring pool, especially if you’re not from a major metropolitan area.
Second, office rent and utilities are serious expenses you wouldn’t have to pay if you switched to a digital workspace. Not only that, but people working from home use their own devices. This, too, will save you a fortune.
Sure, a small office is not a problem, but what happens when you have to expand? The digital workspace is just more scalable.
4. Automating services
Automation will not eliminate your need for a human workforce; it will help you get the most out of it. Imagine paying someone $36 an hour and having them handle data entry or manually send emails for six out of eight hours of their workday.
Simply put, you need automation to handle these menial, repetitive tasks and humans to focus on creative and core assignments.
The thing is not just that this is a time waste (although it can save up to 42% of your time). Anyone who has ever done this job knows how boring it is and how much it can drain your energy. By the time you finish it, it will be hard to get back into the mindset required for these creative tasks. Automation will help you skip this part.
5. Investing in digital marketing
While most people are unfamiliar with how SERPs or search engines work, most have an idea of a hierarchy based on relevance. While this is quite loose, the truth is that the definition in question is fairly accurate. People believe that Google puts the top businesses in the industry at the forefront of their searches, and they’re not wrong about this.
For this reason, digital marketing is one of the key components in growing your business. A good agency will use many techniques to improve your online visibility. They’ll use SEO to increase your organic ranking, as well as PPC to give you an immediate boost. They’ll establish collaborations with influencers and ensure you’re featured in as many databases and review lists as possible.
6. Picking the right collaboration tool
Communication between your employees needs to be standardized. If you need a part of the conversation or a link shared in a conversation, the last thing you need is to try and remember if you shared it on Skype or Viber. With the right collaboration tool, you’ll never have to wonder about this again.
Another thing you should understand is that not all communication happens through dialog. A schedule and a to-do list can convey a much more elaborate message in just a few words. This is what these collaboration tools are the best at.
Lastly, they can help you restrict and grant access based on one’s position in the firm and their role on the project.
7. Handling your cybersecurity
You’re never too small to be a target; the bigger you get, the worse it will be if you don’t have a good cybersecurity system.
First of all, you need to train your employees. You need to explain to them what phishing is and why it’s unsafe to click on every link they receive. Second, you must help them learn how to make good passwords and what constitutes a good one.
We’ve already mentioned the importance of moving to a remote workplace. This is a bit problematic since you don’t control which devices and networks your employees work on.
Lastly, you want to invest more heavily into your cybersecurity. Get premium antivirus and VPN to help keep your online activities safe.
8. Handling customer lifecycle
Every customer undergoes a process before they start paying for your services. First, they hear of you. Then, they try to look you up online. After this, they might research, like looking at what others in the field have to offer. When this is done, your customers might finally decide to purchase.
This is it, right, they’ve bought, so the cycle is complete.
Not exactly!
You see, return customers are the most profitable element of your enterprise. Interpretation of some statistics indicates that about 80% of all your profit comes from just 20% of your most loyal customers. Also, loyal customers eventually turn into brand ambassadors. This is the last stage you’re aiming for, but you need to invest a lot of effort and dedication to reach it.
9. Managing your cash flow
You always hear that you need to spend money to make money, but sometimes overinvesting can land you in a huge problem. Simply put, you need cash for emergency expenses and day-to-day operations. Here’s how you can manage your cash flow more efficiently.
Hiring new people, moving to a bigger office, switching to a more expensive SaaS plan, all of these are solid ideas in a scenario where you’re facing an increased workload. But what if you can just barely afford it? What if your cash reserve becomes so drained that you won’t be able to respond to any kind of emergency? Always keep some cash at hand.
Every decision you make today will have consequences further down the line
Businesses pivot all the time, and no decision you make is final. Still, it’s usually better to pick scalable decisions right away. This way, you save money and reduce downtime caused by your staff adjusting to the new system. Each of the tips on our list should fall under this category, but you should always be on the lookout for more such ideas.
