How to scale your business operations
Last week I mentioned the 2 most common business problems I hear about: today I go into detail on the second one.
Last week I sent an email about the “2 common business problems I hear about” and expanded on the first problem, how to get more clients.
Definitely give it a read here if you missed it.
Then came a good question from George who asked about the second common business problem":
“Good points. What about the problem 2?
How do you scale operations? Creating SOPs maybe? We have this problem so I am wondering if you have any experience with that.”
Good question.
As I mentioned in the post from last week, especially for solopreneurs or smaller businesses, it can often be a see-saw of those 2 problems: you don’t have clients so you focus on getting clients, then you get a bunch of clients and so you focus on doing the work, but then since you stopped trying to find clients, once you finish the work you’re back to needing more clients.
But that’s a discussion for another time.
In terms of scaling operations, you could also simply call it “outsourcing”.
Might not seem obvious (or maybe it is), but if you want to scale up your business operations, you need to find other people or things to do them for you.
From my experience, there are 2 ways to do this:
hire more people, and/or
implement new technology
To keep this short and sweet (because I could write a book on both), scaling isn’t rocket science, although that also doesn’t mean it’s easy. You can only outsource in so many ways, and the simplest ways are usually one or a combo of:
hiring good people, training them well and giving them good instructions/guidance on what needs to be done. This is the more “classic” way that most businesses scale.
by instructions or guidance, make sure to include something like an SOP (Standard operating procedure, or more simply, a guide - this can be as simple as a google/word doc on what to do and how to do it) for whatever you need them to do. Did you hire someone to do your billing? You better map out a step-by-step procedure of how to do it for your company.
by good people, I mean good people. Don’t cheap out on people, it’s the dumbest thing you can do. Why? Because even if it costs you 20% more to hire someone amazing, they will be 300% better than an average hire.
tech. This varies wildly depending on your industry and business, but please implement more tech. It does take some time to learn and implement (don’t expect to just log in and it will magically change your business in 30 seconds), but implementing the right automations, AI, etc., can be a total game-changer in terms of efficiency and cost (ie. spending $100/m for tech instead of hiring someone for $4,000/m to do it manually).
I personally prefer tech over hiring when I can. Cheaper, no need to recruit/interview/hire/train/manage and tech doesn’t need time off for the holidays.
George, I hope this helps.
And if anyone needs more help scaling operations or marketing, let me know. Once in a while I do spend some time helping businesses if it’s the right fit.
Have a great day,
- Josh Schachnow
Canadian immigration lawyer, CEO at Visto.ai
P.S. getting more active on Twitter, make sure you’re following me here: https://x.com/joshschachnow1