Despite the not-so-pleasant economic circumstances, many businesses are finding ways to grow. Niche markets like textile graphics with iron-on vinyl products and startup e-commerce brands are stepping up their game in 2022. In fact, due to the increase of self-employment and more people pursuing entrepreneurship, nearly every hobby, craft, and monetizable skill has found a consistent, loyal following over these past few months. This proves that a bit of determination in your side hustle can blossom into something worth more.
However, while all the growing financial awareness and increasing economic activity are fine and dandy on paper, a common problem most of these up-and-coming companies are facing is the concept of scalability and integrating the necessary infrastructure to support current growth opportunities. As a result, most startups tend to fizzle out and fall off over time because they can’t gather their bearings and sustain much of the early momentum they build up during their initial launch.
Evaluate Your Current Business Operations
The first and most crucial step to improving your brand’s scalability is a comprehensive assessment of your current business operations, highlighting areas of strength and pinpointing specific inefficiencies in your existing processes. In doing so, entrepreneurs can reallocate resources and focus accordingly, learning what business practices jibe with their core functions best and what needs a bit more attention than the others.
- Assess Your Future Earnings Potential: Profits and a positive cash flow are the bottom line that keeps companies up and running. Because consumer demand and trends are well-known for changing drastically, you must evaluate your future earnings potential. On the positive end, any expected growth like doubling your previous quarterly sales by the end of June is a sign of maintaining your course, but if analyses deem otherwise, preparing contingency plans should prioritize.
- Calculate Efficiency Through Return on Assets: Besides your sales performance, you must also evaluate your current business operations by calculating asset efficiency using the return on assets ratio. Often, businesses overlook key areas in their core functions that aren’t providing as many returns as they would like. If your total assets overshadow how much your company is earning every period, this is a clear indicator of something holding back your expected profits.
Build a Strong Foundation for Future Plans
Once you’ve evaluated your business operations and can reasonably assure that most, if not all, processes are working as intended, the next goal to achieving scalability is to build a strong foundation for future growth, expansion, and development plans. At the end of the day, a business can’t sustain growth without the capital or people to back it up, so you must secure extra funding through investors and begin the process of new talent acquisition.
- Secure Extra Funding for Your Business: With a bit of creativity, extra money isn’t the hardest to come by with enough effort, but once we’re talking about the big leagues like equity, finding investors is a lot harder than most realize. As a result, you might want to look into business loan options as debt instruments for your company or get into the habit of presenting to venture capital firms to take an interest in your business plan. You could also try your hand at crypto and wait for the next bull run on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Focus on New Hires and Talent Acquisition: Team members and loyal employees are what breathe life into a business, and for any company that’s experiencing rapid growth, having a sufficient hands-on deck is non-negotiable. Therefore, you must bump your new hires and talent acquisition process because expanding your business leads to developing human resources. And unless your team can manage the extra workload, failure to do so will cause a cascading of problems.
Capitalize on Emerging Trends and New Demand
Last but not least, after you’ve accounted for the sustainability of your core operations and built a strong foundation for future business decisions, current growth opportunities are best sustained by capitalizing on emerging trends and new consumer demand. Remember, scalability is only as good as your capacity to foster innovation and creativity, and knowing what’s in and what’s not requires forward-thinking leadership.
- Incorporate and Invest in New Technologies: Technology is steering the future. With many emerging technologies flexing their ability to create and improve the quality of life, incorporating these systems into your business framework is necessary. For example, while Meta’s shift into virtual reality (VR) tech hasn’t been doing too well, it’s a smart move that will build the future of what the company plans to achieve. And if you want to scale your business, a bit of future-proofing is a great place to start.
Laying the Groundwork for a Successful Future
Your brand’s scalability ties in with a lot of planning and thinking two steps ahead of your competition. And given the sheer amount of volatility and uncertainty in the markets right now, you’ll need to lay the groundwork ASAP to claim that successful future waiting for you.