Top 5 Challenges of Scaling Your Business

Did you know, “70% of startups struggle with scaling their business”? There’s no denying that scaling your business is going to be difficult, but if you manage to scale-up successfully, your business will boom - which is every CEO's goal, right?

Are you about to scale-up your business? Here are the top 5 challenges you’re likely to face when scaling your business:

Scaling too soon
How do you know if you’re ready to scale up your business? If you’re unclear on who your target customer is, or if there isn’t a big enough demand in the market for your product or service – you’re not ready to scale up. Making sure your product or service is fit for purpose without errors, is key to ensuring your products and services are ready to scale-up.

Shift of focus
Going from having a couple of hundred customers, to having a couple of thousand will mean the focus of your team will change. As a company, you’re always looking to develop your products and services, through offering new functionalities or developing a completely new product. However, if these functionalities aren’t tested properly there are likely to be customer service issues, leading to wasted time and ultimately wasted money on dealing with said customer issues. It’s key to test, test and test again before releasing a new feature to ensure customer issues are kept to a minimum. The focus of your team needs to be on scaling up, not dealing with customer issues which shouldn’t have arisen had the correct testing been carried out.

Finding the right people
We may be stating the obvious here, but people are very valuable to a company and choosing the right ones is key to the success and scale-up of a company. Choosing a new staff member, supplier or investor is easy enough, but some companies tend to forget about the bigger picture. Therefore it’s important to choose people with the right skillset and experience to help scale your company.

Change management issues
You’ve championed a management structure which works well with a team of 30 employees, however this doesn’t necessarily mean the same management structure will work well for a team of 200+ employees. Therefore it’s important for both your management team to be able to adapt their leadership accordingly, as well as the rest of your team to be able to adapt to the changes in management and leadership structure.

Scaling magnifies the good with the bad
Good news travels fast, but bad news travels faster. If you’re doing a fantastic job then you’re likely to be getting good feedback and in this digital era it’s highly likely your clients will be taking to social media to sing your praise. However, there is also a downside to the digital era and if your systems are down, your clients are likely to also take to social media to let you know, because they want a prompt response. Therefore you need to have a Plan B, C and D in case things go wrong.

Therefore it’s key to plan the scaling of your business very well, to enable you and your team to be able overcome any obstacles which will inevitably arise during the scale up.