Structure Your Business for Scalability

Structuring a business for growth is an extremely important factor when building a business for profit and success. I’ve had years of experience and worked with numerous clients that never structured their business to be scaled up. Any business model can be restructured for scalability at any time, but the sooner the better. I am completely positive that structuring your business for growth is the most strategic, lucrative, and best thing you will ever do.

Entrepreneurs tend to get very excited about new business ideas they have, and they often jump the gun and put those ideas into motion without stepping back and taking the time necessary to map out their journey first. This is a common event in the lives of most entrepreneurs, and not planning out a good route to your goals is dangerous. By not taking the first few steps necessary to structure your business, you set your self up for defeat.

Imagine running into battle and not knowing:

Why you are fighting
Who you are fighting
How big your competition is
When the battle is
Where the battles is
What you need to bring
What you need to do
How you are going to win, etc...

Answer the who, what, when, where, why questions about your business and you will know how you are going to structure it.

Who is your customer, and who are you?
What will you offer? A service, a product, a combination of the twain?
When will you do most of your work? (If you sell donuts, get up early)
Where will you conduct most if not all of your business?
Why do customers need your product/service?

The more detailed about each of these you can be, the close to determining your meme you will be. Your meme will ultimately tell people who have dealt with you in the past who you are without having to think much about it, eventually this becomes brand recognition. I will have more info about meme and brand recognition for you later.

After you answer these 5 questions in good detail, you will be ready to start structuring your business for growth. The art of a good business is to find a niche, fill it, then replicate the process as much as you can. This is why most businesses start out in one little town, then spread across town, into the next town, city, state, country, and then across the world.

Structuring a business is mentally intensive in the beginning and often requires help from others in order to get extra perspectives. Usually the best thing to do is set aside a series of several afternoons so you can sit down at a table with a computer and tons of paper and pens. Begin researching what experts in your industry are doing, and how they have structured their business. This will immediately eliminate some of the work for you. If you consider someone in your industry an expert and you would like to be right where they are, write down their contact info and hang on to it.

The best place to start structuring your business is a training program. You want to be able to teach someone else how to do exactly what you do so you can hire out. Once you develop a system of training you like, test on someone you know. If you need sales reps, find someone you know that is a sales rep or has had sales experience and ask them if you could simply train them with your system. If they volunteer, after the training give them a quiz to ensure they were trained properly. If they wish to sell for you, give them the first opportunity because later they could be your sales manager handling all the headaches for you but being compensated to do so.

Another important step to structuring your business for growth is to allow your employees to see all of the information about your business. Let them know your plans, thoughts, ideas, expenses, and profits. Along with this comes being fair. You can make twice or three times what anyone under you makes as long as you let them continually make more money or treat them very well and offer opportunities to grow. Let them know about new resources that you consider very valuable reads. If you do this, then your business has no option but to grow.

Understanding good human resources and treating your staff very well is the best thing you can do after your business is structured correctly. You will eventually notice that you have the best sales reps of anyone in your industry or locale. I will also offer more info on human resources and management in a short while.

Right after you develop what you feel is a functional business structure, let it run for a while without any immediate growth so that you can figure out all of the bumps and problems before you have huge contracts and expenses to deal with.

Structuring your business for scalability is the best thing you can do, even if you don’t want it to grow much. In the long run, the job will be much easier if you have strong systems that have been proven functional, and automate your work flow.