5 Proven Ways to Grow and Scale Your Business

One of the main reasons why many businesses fail is due to lack of scaling. It's not enough to just have a good idea and an excellent marketing strategy. To remain competitive, you need to find new and innovative ways to capture a bigger slice of your market and to keep your customers satisfied. Truth be told, scaling your business takes a great deal of planning, a commitment to taking action and implementation of excellent exponential growth strategies. 

That being said, here are some effective strategies you can implement to exponentially grow your business. 

Ways to Expand Your Brand's Potential

There is a very good chance that you already have the right kind of foundation to expand your brand. Now all you need is a few good strategies and the grit to implement them to see the kind of growth you want. Here are some strategies that will help expand your brand's potential:

1. Automate Your Systems

Systems automation is a great way to increase efficiency and save yourself a lot of time. When starting a business, you will probably have to do everything yourself. This includes accounting, invoicing, collections and so on. But as your business grows, these processes, although still very necessary, become way to numerous and complicated for one person to undertake. That is why you need to find ways to automate as many of them as possible. 

The best brands realize that accounts payable automated for businesses is the best way to ensure that 80% of the workload associated with supplier payments is eliminated. This further ensures that the brand eliminates any financial and compliance risks, scales rapidly without needing to add more staff and accelerates their potential financial growth. 

2. Create a Robust Customer Loyalty Program

Scaling your business will first require you to keep the market share that you already have and find new ways to increase it. One of the best ways to do that is to create a robust customer loyalty program that rewards those who buy or do business with your brand. Not only is this an excellent way to encourage your customers to become repeat customers but it's also a great way to encourage word of mouth marketing. People who benefit from doing business with you will want to tell their friends and family so they too can benefit. This increases your customer base without you having to lift a finger or spend exorbitant amounts on marketing. 

Want additional insight? Read 4 Step Guide to Strategic Planning now to learn more

3. Be Quick to Identify New Opportunities

There is no growth if you don't identify and take advantage of new opportunities. New opportunities here mean things like:

• New markets that you can exploit and sell to the same services and products that you already have. 
• New ways to create new products and services to sell to the market that you already have. 
• New ways to upsell more products to your current markets. 

This will involve extensive research and analysis of market trends, the competition and your own strength. As important as expansion is, there is always an underlying danger that comes with overextending yourself. So this expansion into new markets and new opportunities has to be measured and calculated. 

4. Create Strategic Partnerships

They say that no man is an island. This principle applies to businesses as well. You will need to form strategic partnerships with businesses that complement yours. Through these partnerships, you will have access to new customers and several markets that you typically wouldn't approach as a brand. Not only that but being in a partnership with an upwardly mobile brand will encourage and motivate you to sharpen your competitive edge to remain relevant. Once you have that mentality, you will be quicker to find new opportunities, create new products and generally expand the scope of your business so that you bring more to the table. 

5. Think Globally

It's easy to get pigeon-holed into your own local market. These are the people you know and the environment in which you are comfortable. However, being so locally oriented has its own disadvantages. For starters, you can only capture so much of the market before you run out of...market. Secondly, it's much easier to become the dominant brand in your locale which can bring about complacency. 

When you start thinking globally, you open up a new world of challenges and opportunities. Think of companies such as Airbnb, Uber and Amazon, these are all companies that are locally owned yet operate on a global scale. Technically, the core business is the same whether it's operated locally or internationally. It's brand scaling at its best. Besides, thinking globally will give you an opportunity to tap into a much wider and more robust human resource in terms of foreign employees and contractors who might actually come at a cheaper rate but offer more value for money. 

It takes a great deal of planning and gradual growth but the exponential growth of a brand calls for thinking outside of the typical box and being ready to take on new challenges as well as exploit unfamiliar opportunities.