You’ve spent anywhere from months to years diligently growing your small business, and now you feel like you’re in a good place to scale up. However, you have several essential things you need to consider to make sure your business is ready. Before you scale up, be sure your business has taken care of these necessities.
Build Your Online Presence
Leveraging the power of the internet is vital for scaling up your business, and you should take a few steps to get your online presence ready for your growth. First, consider creating a blog for your company. Blogs are simple to set up, and they can help you build authority and gain new customers.
Additionally, if you’re getting ready to launch or upgrade your e-commerce site, you need to make sure your servers can handle the increase in traffic. Having a website that’s slow to load or that crashes when too many people visit can sabotage all your plans for scaling up.
Set Up Your Social Media Channels
Another important part of building your online presence is making sure your social media channels are ready to go. Social media offers one of the easiest ways to your reach your customers, but gaining a large following isn’t easy. By creating and sharing relevant, helpful, and in-depth information on your social media channels, you can build a loyal following that’s excited to grow with you.
Get Your CRM System Ready
When your business was small and still growing, you could likely get away with a customer relationship management (CRM) system that was set up on a spreadsheet. However, as you get ready to scale up, you need to make sure your CRM system is ready to handle more people. The last thing you want to do is lose relationships with your customers because your CRM system can’t handle your growth. Additionally, if you haven’t set up a CRM system yet, it’s now essential that you do so.
Upgrade Your Invoice Management System
While a manual invoice management system and writing checks by hand were acceptable when your business was very small and still growing, these aren’t viable options for long-term growth. Instead, you’ll want to upgrade your invoice management system to one that offers some of the latest features. For example, you can get a system that lets you print directly from QuickBooks and provides advanced fraud protection features. This allows you to spend more time running your business and less time worrying about invoice management.
Outsource Nonessential Tasks
Along with automating invoice management, you should also take note of other non-essential tasks you can outsource. If the time you spend trying to figure out your taxes is taking away from time you could be devoting to marketing and attracting more clients, you need to outsource that task to a CPA. Just keep in mind that you should never outsource hiring, client relationships, and the final say on investments.
When you’re ready to scale up your small business, make sure you’ve handled these five necessities so you can focus on even more growth in the future.