If your business has been stable, doing well and growing year on year, the next step would likely be to consider scaling your business. Scaling a business does not simply equate to growing a company. While a company’s growth is one of the focus, scaling a business involves much more planning and thought. The business strategy must now be replicable, profitable and scalable, hence, original business strategy may even have to go through some revisions.
Businesses that wish to scale up have to be ready and willing to take risks and incur costs to explore new markets and locations. They need to put in more work and hire more manpower take on marketing and sales demands while keeping their original market presence strong and intact.
Potential challenges when scaling your business
1. Identifying New Customers
According to HubSpot’s Marketing Statistics of 2021, customer acquisition is the primary marketing objective of 49% of companies. Building a sustainable and growing customer base begins with understanding the needs your product or service meets. This should never be a guessing game. Create realistic buyer personalities based on current customers and research them intensively with quantitative and qualitative methods. Discover what they truly want and find the channels, people and spaces they interact most with so that you can reach out to them and satisfy their want.
2. Lead Generation
Even after identifying your new and ideal customers, growing the customer base will take consistent effort to generate leads. One good tip is to seek out platforms that will provide sufficient lead flow and thereby, easy access to new customers. For companies involved in providing relocation services, find the platforms potential clients will be searching on and make sure to be visible there.
Amazon, Alibaba and Taobao are a prime examples. As a platform businesses, they connect small businesses, who are not household names and may not even have a storefront, to buyers all around the world. These small businesses are able to reach out to many new leads and experience sales growth without investing a lot of time and money. Similarly, the relocation businesses will be able to expand their reach on platforms.
3. Brand Awareness
It is not enough to be where your customers are, you have to get them to come to you as well. They need to know who you are and have a sense of brand trust and loyalty with you. The companies we know and recognise now started small and only grew big after investing millions of hours and dollars to build their brand. Under Armour only took off after founder Kevin Plank managed to sell his clothing to the Georgia Institute of Technology for $17,000. From there, NFL teams began to start donning Under Armour and it was picked up by major retailers.
One way to grow brand awareness is through public relations (PR). Find ways to create buzz for your brand, build relationships with the media channels your customers use and earn valuable PR coverage. Whether it is in the online space or the physical space, every bit counts. Note that while publicity is good, it can also backfire if your media pitch is not genuine or your products and services are not as touted.
Businesses can also consider partnering with complementary businesses with a stronger brand reputation or social media presence to produce limited-edition products or even, run giveaways. This may require more marketing dollars but it is worth being associated with a more reputable brand as awareness for your brand is likely to go up. You can even tap into their pool of customers and gain new customers for yourself.
4. Managing Workflow Changes
Scaling a business also means changes in the company workflow. In order to focus on pursuing expansion and scaling, business owners and company management teams will need to relinquish some decision making and/or tweak employees’ roles and responsibilities. This takes time, effort, planning and a whole lot of communication. New workflows are likely to experience teething problems at the beginning too.
Overcome this by building strategic partnerships. With the help of a reliable partner, relocation service providers can plug into a vast network of resources to reduce workflow change, manpower increases and financial investment. In 2017, Canada Post discovered that their existing customers lacked a seamless payment and shipping solution. They were wasting precious hours that could have been spent growing their businesses. Canada Post decided to develop a strategic collaboration with PayPal Canada to launch a convenient, easy-to-use shipping and payment solution for small businesses to save money and time for their customers and for themselves as well. Similarly, time and money is of the essence for businesses looking to scale, work with strategic partners to accelerate your business’s growth.
How Moovaz Can Help
As you can see, scaling a business takes deliberate planning and careful investment. From marketing to operations to sales, every aspect of the business has to be relooked and improved to support a scalable business model. It is the best time to collaborate strategically with platforms and other businesses to scale your business towards success.
At Moovaz, we design the relocation platform to support the growth of relocation businesses of all sizes. Let the relocation platform delight your customer and synchronise your workflow so you can scale your business with confidence!
