So, you want to scale your business.
Maybe you’re a solopreneur ready to take the next steps to grow your brand. Maybe you’re a small company with one or two employees or contractors looking to reach more customers.
Whatever your situation, you’ve probably asked yourself, “How do I scale my business the right way?”
Good question.
After all, you want to avoid landing in the 20% of businesses that fail within their first year, or the 50% that fail within five years. 🙅♀️
Scaling too fast is also a danger. Two-thirds of the fastest-growing start-ups fail. 😱
It’s strange to say, but true:
Growth isn’t always good.
The wrong kind of growth can be downright disastrous.
So you can see why it’s so important to get scaling your business RIGHT.
To NOT become a statistic, you need the RIGHT pathway to growth.
And it all starts with learning what scaling successfully looks like.
After that, I’ll show you the roadmap to learn how to scale your business the right way. Because it matters.
It could mean life and longevity for your business…
Or death. 💀
Need the roadmap, training, and mentorship to scale your business correctly NOW? It’s all inside my Content Transformation System.
Need to see exactly how I approach and teach scaling in this program? Watch my free training.
How Do I Scale My Business? Table of Contents
How Do I Scale My Business? Learn What Scaling Successfully Looks Like
How Do I Scale My Business the Right Way? 3 Must-Dos
Time to Scale Your Business: What Now?
How Do I Scale My Business? Learn What Scaling Successfully Looks Like
Scaling a business successfully means your business grows without breaking.
It also means:
- Your business foundations are strong. You’re crystal clear about what your niche is, who your audience is, what differentiates you from the competition, your product-market fit, and your branding. You have a great website, too.
- You planned for steady growth. You’re not trying to reach rapid growth, which is unsustainable and chaotic.
- You put systems in place to help bear the burdens of that growth. Those burdens include higher demand for products, more clients to juggle, more employees or contractors to manage, increased marketing efforts, etc.
But how in the heck do you achieve all of that?
As it turns out, the right way to scale a business depends on a few factors. Like…
Sustainability ♻
#facts: Growing too much, too fast will inevitably break your brand.
You’ve probably witnessed examples of brands hitting explosive growth in the blink of an eye. Maybe you even envied them.
But, the truth is, growing quickly and exponentially makes your business extremely fragile. It puts a massive strain on each of your brand’s building blocks. And that strain could make you collapse.
One study found that businesses with the fastest revenue growth performed worse than their counterparts which grew more slowly.
That’s because growing slowly but steadily is more sustainable. You’ll have time to reinforce your foundations so they can handle more demand and more stress. And, overall, that will build a stronger brand that will stand the test of time.
To sum up: When it comes to scaling, be the tortoise, not the hare. 🐢 Slow and steady wins the race!
Planning 📋
The point of scaling is to be able to handle more work for more revenue, but none of that will happen without the correct systems and strategies in place before you scale.
For example, say you’re a solopreneur who wants more clients. You focus on marketing to reach a wider audience so more of them can find you. But – you haven’t built your business systems to handle more clients.
Your marketing is effective, so more clients do arrive. All of a sudden, you’re running around like a headless chicken trying to manage them all while attempting to produce the same level of service you always have.
Spoiler: It doesn’t work. You crash and burn, leaving a handful of clients unsatisfied and even angry. Your reputation takes a blow. You lose work. You lose revenue. Soon you’re back at square one.
Yikes.
If you stumble into scaling without a plan, you’ll launch headlong into an inevitable disaster.
Put the Pillars in Place FIRST
With the twin pillars of sustainability and planning behind you, you’ll have a better chance of scaling successfully and growing your business for longevity.
The next question is, how do you build these pillars?
First, you should know I have a mentorship program for that – The Content Transformation© System.
It’s THE resource for learning all the skills you need to grow a sustainable business around your expertise and skill set. It’s a roadmap to building, growing, and scaling your brand so you reach your goals.
👉 For a preview of the methodology I use in the system, check out my free training.
But, if you’d rather get the general gist first, I’ll explain the pathway of how to scale your business correctly in this blog. This is:
- The way that won’t break your brand by adding too much pressure too fast
- The way to grow without the growing pains
- The most seamless transition from a party of one (or a few) to a party of many
Ready?
How Do I Scale My Business the Right Way? 3 Must-Dos
How do you scale your business so it works and results in the growth you want?
Before you ever start expanding your team, your offers, your marketing, or your products/services, you need to prepare.
Don’t just blindly jump into scaling. Create a strategy for moving forward. This is the smart way to scale. 💡
Here are the must-dos you need to check off before you can look toward growth, plus the action items associated with each.
This list follows the wheel we teach in the Content Transformation System: mindset, skills, then growth.
1. Hone Your Mindset
Mindset is everything in business. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
How you think informs how you react to the daily stresses and challenges of life and work.
And how you react determines how you perform – whether you SUCCEED or FAIL.
Ultimately, the right mindset is a growth mindset. It’s how high-achievers think.
- You’re resilient and able to pick yourself up after a failure.
- You’re willing to try new things.
- You’re willing to learn, even when technically you’re an “expert.”
- You’re not afraid of hard work.
- You’re proactive. You plan, set goals, and anticipate challenges.
- You view roadblocks as opportunities, not dead ends.
- You view mistakes as lessons to learn from, NOT the end of the world.
- You believe you’ll succeed.
But what if the above attributes don’t describe you? What if you’re a naturally negative person?
You can learn to adopt a growth mindset. 💡 And that will help you build and scale a successful business.
I know because I did.
I was once negative and reactive. I was afraid of failure and mistakes. I took setbacks hard. I was burned out, and I wasn’t seeing the success I wanted from my business.
But I learned to reframe my thinking, to start viewing challenges through a different lens, and to actively create my own optimism.
Guess what happened?
Those shifts led to building my business to seven figures, then successfully selling it for over $1 million.
My performance changed because my thought processes changed. I planned, strategized, worked hard, learned from roadblocks, and I didn’t give up.
In the Content Transformation System, mindset resetting is an integral piece of the pathway to scaling. In fact, it’s so integral, it makes up the entirety of Phase 1.
Mindset matters. Don’t skip honing yours.
2. Sharpen Your Skill Set
After mindset, consider your skills. 📝
After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.
If you don’t have strong business skills in place before you start scaling, you’re asking for failure.
That’s like jumping into the deep end before learning to swim.
To understand how to scale your business successfully, you need:
- Business skills to ensure your brand foundations are in place and rock-solid.
- Marketing skills to ensure you’re targeting the right audience and marketing to them in ways they like to be reached, that are also sustainable.
Let’s explore both.
Business Skills
Before we go any further, remember:
Business skills ≠ creative skills.
You can’t run OR scale a business solely with your expertise – even if you’re AMAZINGLY skilled at that thing (whether it’s writing, content strategy, consulting, SEO, you name it).
If you want to build and scale a business around your creative skill/expertise, you still need business skills to do it. Those include:
- Establishing your niche and target audience
- Building an ICA (Ideal Client Avatar)
- Building your branding (logo, colors, brand tone/voice)
- Finding your product-market fit
- Setting up your website
- Managing your business finances
- And more
As you can see, business skills are foundational to starting a business and MUST be in place before you ever consider scaling.
Think of it this way: Before you build a house, you must first pour the foundation and build the framework. These things are what will keep the house standing when storms hit. They also make it possible to expand the house in the future.
Your business skills and foundations will play the same roles as you look to expand, grow, and scale.
Marketing Skills
Once your business skills are in place, you also need to cultivate marketing skills to effectively grow your reach sustainably.
What’s the #1 sustainable marketing technique out there?
Content marketing.
It costs 62% less than traditional advertising (like in-your-face ads) but brings in three times as many leads (the people who are the most likely to buy from you).
Consumers rely heavily on content and prefer to read it to get information, get to know brands, and help them make purchase decisions. 70% of marketers read at least 3-5 pieces of content before they talk to a salesperson.
97% of businesses use content marketing exactly for those reasons.
So, if you want to eventually scale your business, you need to understand how to set up and run a content marketing strategy. It’s the sustainable way to grow and nurture your audience AND the heart-led way to make genuine connections with them.
This means you don’t have to learn how to sell to scale a business. (You’re not a salesperson!) Your content will do the heavy lifting of proving your expertise, providing value, and answering your customer’s questions.
And, when you’re ready, you can also scale your content marketing for even better results and more reach.
In the Content Transformation System, you learn EVERY skill you need to build and scale your business, step-by-step. Get inside my free training to see a preview of the pathway.
Lean into Your Expertise
If you’re just starting your business-building journey but KNOW you’ll want to scale eventually, don’t forget to lean into your expertise.
For example, if you know beyond a doubt that you want to run a business and be your own boss, think about the skills you’ve already built in your career.
- Did you go to school and get a specialized degree?
- Did you work in a specific industry for years?
- Did you work in a company department doing a specialized job?
Take that experience and run with it, especially if you’re good at it.
For example, say you worked in IT for years, but now you want to transition to copywriting and build a business around it. Specialize and become a copywriter for IT businesses… and then scale that into a copywriting agency with a team of IT writers.
See how that works? (Just remember to establish your business pillars BEFORE you scale.)
3. Establish Your Website to Get Ready to Scale Your Business
Do NOT attempt to scale your business without your website and branding in place, first.
Think of it this way:
If your business existed physically, you’d invest in a brick-and-mortar or an office from which to run your operations. 🏬
Similarly, if your business primarily exists online, you need a virtual storefront or a virtual office.
This will be your home base for selling your products/services AND a primary channel for publishing content that nurtures your audience (so they can convert into customers).
Your website should serve as both. Ultimately, it will be your content house – all roads will lead here.
And, no, social media platforms will not serve the same purpose as a website.
- You don’t own your social media profiles – Meta, Twitter, etc., do.
- You don’t control the visibility of your content on social media. Fickle algorithms determine that – and your profiles can disappear without any apparent reason, too.
In contrast, you own your website and have complete control of the content on it.
Establishing a website and building a blog on it will get these kinds of results:
- People will come to associate your brand with your website.
- Your website will grow in authority, especially on search engines like Google.
- With SEO, you can rank for the keywords your audience is searching for – and thus pull in more traffic.
- If your website is set up for optimizing the user experience, it will nurture and convert visitors into customers over time.
Time to Scale Your Business: What’s Next
When you wondered “How do I scale my business correctly?” you were probably concerned with the actual steps involved in expanding your brand’s operations.
But those are the easiest part.
Why?
Because scaling a business is all in the prep work.
The preparatory work sets you up perfectly for hiring, delegating, or expanding.
With the foundations in place, suddenly the rest makes sense.
To sum up…
You’ve done the mindset work. ✅
You’ve built business and marketing skills and laid a sturdy foundation for your brand. ✅
You’ve established your website and made it the center of your online business activities. ✅
Now it’s time to scale your business. It may look like this:
- Hiring your first contractor.
- Expanding your team.
- Expanding your services or range of products.
- Delegating the workload and shifting from solopreneur to company owner.
- Ramping up your content marketing (for instance, publishing 3 posts per week versus one).
Now you’re not lost when you consider each possibility. Now you know that you need both a plan and a foundation in place before approaching any of these scaling opportunities.
That’s mega-powerful. 💥
By now you’re probably raring to dig into the nitty-gritty of building, reinforcing, and scaling your brand. BUT…
If you need mentorship, training, guidance, and a roadmap to scaling your business, we’re here for you. It’s all inside the Content Transformation© System.
This 12-month mentorship teaches you EVERY business and marketing skill you need to build and scale a business around your passion and unique expertise.
To learn how it works, my free training will show you the pathway to growing and scaling your business in 90 days. Watch now.
