Scaling up your business isn't about steady growth over time. It's about having a clear strategy for quickly expanding the business to achieve full-scale hypergrowth.

Most start-ups grow organically, adding customers here and there and gradually expanding over time. Scaling up aims to accelerate this process, pushing your growth beyond that slow, organic pace. To achieve this, every element of your business model needs to be reviewed, refined, and systemised to build scalability into the business from the ground up.

Systemise your processes and build scalability into your DNA

Scaling up is a fast-paced, hectic and transformative process for any business. However, the return on your scale-up investment can be significant with proper planning, strategy, and funding. Systemisation is the starting point and the driver of your efficiency.

Your systematisation process aims to make the business ordered, standardised, and efficient. Look at how the business works. Write down every process and operational action. Then, see how these processes can be made as lean and effective as possible. Aim to make these operations easily repeatable to scale on demand as the business grows.

If any processes can be automated, automate them. Automation is a crucial driver of productivity and efficiency, so use technology to help streamline your processes.

Remove yourself from the everyday running of the business

This may sound counterproductive, but a big goal of a scale-up strategy is to make yourself redundant from the everyday business. If all the operational elements of the business have to pass through you, then that limits your ability to scale.

Remove yourself from the equation so the business can grow without your everyday input at the operational level. This allows the business to function without you, giving you more time to focus on high-level strategic work. That’s more time for business development, innovation, and building relationships with customers and suppliers.

Expand your executive team and workforce

Once you’ve stepped back from the day-to-day tasks, your role can become far more of a driving force behind the business's growth. But you can’t do this single-handedly. You’ll need a close and trusted executive team to work with, an experienced management team to whom you can delegate, and an expanded workforce at all levels of the organisation.

As the start-up evolves into a scale-up, the business will become more complex, and the workload will increase. To cope with this and keep the business running like a well-oiled machine, you need a team ready for the task and entirely on board with your business's goals and values.

Increase your operational infrastructure

Hypergrowth of the business means a greater volume of sales and work. To meet this demand, you urgently need to expand your operational infrastructure. That means looking at the size of your workspace, the amount of tech, equipment, and machinery you have, and the ways you deliver your end product/service to your increased customer base.

The key here is to apply a LEAN methodology - keeping everything as simple and basic as possible while also building the capacity to deal with this increased volume of work. Get the operational procedures out of your head and turn them into lean, seamless processes. Invest in the equipment and operational systems needed to cope with your increased output.

Look at investment and access to funding

To bring your scale-up plans to life, you need to invest heavily in the future of the business. You’re likely to require new assets and equipment, larger premises or multiple workspaces, more raw materials or stock, and a bigger workforce - which will mean a larger payroll each month.

You may be fortunate to have plenty of spare cash in your reserves. But for most potential scale-ups, there’s going to be a need for external funding. This could mean you and your fellow directors putting money into the business. This could mean approaching lenders and business finance providers to take out a loan. Or it could mean looking for private investors to plough money into the business. Whatever this additional funding source, you have a clear funding strategy to work from – a funding plan aligned with your scale-up plan.

Share your strategic goal and growth plan

For scaling up to succeed, everyone in the business must be on board with the idea. Make your growth aim and key numbers transparent so the whole team is engaged and motivated by this common aim. Ensure you have a detailed scale-up plan considering the challenges of expanding your workforce, resources, and operational infrastructure.

Think about:

• WHY do you want to scale, and what will the end goal be?
• HOW you will achieve this – and what the timescales will be.
• WHO do you need on board to make this work?
• WHAT new assets and equipment will be required?
• WHERE will the funding come from to bankroll this plan?

If you’re thinking about scaling up your established start-up, please do get in touch. We’ll help you build a viable scale-up plan with costings, budgets and achievable SMART targets to meet.