Does your business have the capacity to grow and scale? Will your business systems, infrastructure and team be able to accommodate growth? Scalability is about capacity and capability.

If growth causes your company to stumble because of confusion, orders falling through the cracks, insufficient staff, miscommunication, not enough manufacturing or delivery capacity –you’re going to have unhappy customers. The manual processes that were fine when you were small, now won’t let you move fast enough. You’ll either be putting out fires or desperately trying to keep your head above water. All of which is stressful.

Scaling a business means setting the stage to enable and support growth in your company. It requires planning, some funding and the right systems, staff, processes, technology and partners.

Here are five strategies to scaling your business:

Evaluate and Plan

Take a hard look inside your business to see if you are ready for growth. You can’t know what to do differently unless you take stock of where your business stands today.

Strategize what you need to do to increase sales.  Then assume your orders doubled or tripled overnight. Does your organization have the people and systems to handle those new customers, without failing or injuring your reputation? This is where a good plan is essential.

Invest in your growth

Your growth plan may call for additional staff, deploying new technology, and creating systems to measure and manage results. However, the return of investment can be exponential.

Evaluate sales processes

Scaling your business obviously assumes more sales and revenue. Do you have the sales structure in place to generate more sales?  Looking at sales from end to end. Do you have:

• A sufficient lead flow to generate the desired number of prospects.
• Marketing systems to track and manage leads.
• Enough sales representatives to follow up and close leads.
• A robust system to manage sales processes.
• A billing system and a receivables function to follow up to ensure invoices are collected timely.

Adopt technology

Technology makes it easier and less expensive to scale a business.  You can gain huge economies of scale and more throughput, with less labor, if you invest wisely in technology.

• Automation can help you run your business at lower cost and more efficiently by minimizing manual work.
• Systems integration is a prime area for improvement in most businesses. Companies today don’t run off of a single system — they may have a dozen or more systems. If those systems don’t work together, they create silos, which in turn multiply communication and management problems as your company grows.

Strategically outsource

Technology gives huge leverage, but at the end of the day you still need people.

• How do you find qualified help quickly? Sometimes the answer is to outsource.
• Do you have enough customer service, sales and management staff?
• What about the people who are responsible for your manufacturing, inventory and delivery of product or services?

Third party outsourcing companies invest in systems that enable them to be much more efficient in handling a function than your company. Trying to replicate that function internally may take too much time or money.  Instead, finding a reliable outsourcing platform often allows your business to scale better, faster and cheaper.