Scaling Your Small to Medium-Sized Business: What’s Your Strategy?

As your small or mid-sized organization continues on a path of high growth, you probably will arrive at a point where this growth gets delayed by various constraints. These constraints are usually operational, meaning you may have insufficient resources to deliver goods and services. The unfortunate fact about this is that this can grow to affect all aspects of your business. Simply put, you need the adequate resources to move your business to a place where your infrastructure can support the growth.

In order to accomplish moving in the right direction while still enabling your resources to support your maturity, you should seriously consider scaling your organization. By providing a platform that can deliver an effective growth strategy and pave the way for a positive transition, you are creating a path that will lead to a new and improved operational framework that will stay with you through the long run. Remember, your small to medium-sized organization is crucial in this world’s marketplace – you create jobs, drive innovation, and increase competition within your market while playing an important role in driving the economy forward. But how do you accomplish scaling your business?

First off, prioritization is essential. Knowing what you want to accomplish, where you want to see your company go, and what the most important steps will be lays the framework for the scaling process. How will your business deliver that growth? By including an operational strategy in your corporate strategy, you can set yourself up to spell out how your business will progress with the upcoming change. Chances are, management will want to keep the organization lean to maintain flexibility while regarding both centralized and decentralized structures. Maintaining flexibility is rooted directly in your ability to provide efficient selling, general, and administrative structures.

Prior to scaling your business framework, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of where your company is at in terms of operational effectiveness – meaning, where are you now, where do you want to go, and how will you get there? Often, there are back office procedures that can be outsourced, enabling greater cost flexibility, freeing up resources, and cutting costs. By knowing what you’re good at and what type of an impact that makes, you realize that those are the things that are initially critical to your business and will influence success.

Scaling usually involves shifting away from a loose, informal structure, to a tighter more formal organizational framework. Taking the first crucial step and establishing simple departments, management structures, reporting lines, and communication channels takes you to the next level in the process of scaling. Also, it’s important to note that drawing up policies and disciplines and establishing standard processes will lead to improvements in administration, finance, and human resources. But, what technology do you need in place to accomplish all this? Stay tuned for next week’s post where we will go into detail on how to leverage your technology to scale your SME.