Scaling Up: Strategic Approaches for Evolving Your Business

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Running a successful business is an impressive achievement on its own. But entrepreneurs who want more out of their companies often feel like they hit a plateau when it comes to measures of success. These strategies will point you in the right direction.

Outline a Business Structure

Selecting a business structure will impact how you organize your company as it grows. Whether you form an LLC, a sole proprietorship, a partnership, an S Corp, or a corporation, some paperwork — and forethought — is required.

For example, forming an S Corp permits you to use pass-through taxation and provides savings on self-employment tax. Business owners can even claim losses as deductions come tax time.

After checking the regulations in your state, you can even self-file or use a formation service to establish your S Corp.

Invest in Growth

Now that your business is lucrative, it's the perfect time to reinvest in your business. Small business loans might be a great fit if you have big-ticket items to purchase, but many smaller-scale expenses are affordable, too.

For example, automation software is typically low-cost, but it can help you save thousands of human hours (and a lot of money) over time. This makes the investment well worth it.

Overhaul (or Start) Marketing Efforts

Marketing might seem like an afterthought when scaling up, but it should be central to your business planning. As Yelp explains, marketing is paramount for attracting an audience, encouraging them to buy from you, and ensuring that they stick around.

Of course, marketing to your clients or customers shouldn't be one-sided, with the sole goal of making money. It's crucial that you connect with your audience and meet their needs with your product or service.

One of the best ways to market these days is with social media via video; for example, Twitter confirms that Tweets with video attract ten times more engagement than those without.

Tricks like using a merge video tool to quickly combine videosmake hyper-focused media campaigns easier. You can easily tailor your video campaigns to the platform of your choice and watch the leads rush in.

Think Strategy When Partnering Up

Competition can be brutal in business, but there are also benefits to forming a network of like-minded professionals to bounce ideas off. And if you're networking with similar yet non-competitor businesses, it makes sense to consider strategic partnerships that will benefit you both.

Indeed describes at least six business relationships that could be beneficial to your company, ranging from marketing help to technology tradeoffs.

Research (or chat with existing network contacts) potential opportunities and determine what businesses might mesh well with yours — and be willing to work together.

Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

Growing your business might mean tackling some uncomfortable challenges. Namely, it could mean changing up your business model, your budget, or even your products.

In fact, expanding your product line could be just the ticket to scaling your company. No matter what product or service you offer, you can't go wrong by exploring what else could meet your consumers' needs.

Product development is often more complex than an “aha” moment and a spiffy new product launch. Expanding a business through new product development takes a lot of planning — and contributions from all your team members.

Take the time to do it right, though, and you'll land on a product that's perfect for your customers and expand your business.

Get Up Close and Personal with Your Biz Data

Especially if your business is on the smaller side, you might be operating casually. But now is the time to formalize your operations so you can build up.

Exploring your company's data is an essential step in achieving growth. Sales trends, customer complaints, audience demographics, advertising impact, and other data points give invaluable insight.

Then, you can leverage that data to enhance efficiency, adding automation and tweaking processes to be smarter, faster, and more cost-effective.

Business growth won't happen overnight, no matter how much you invest. But with the right game plan, including a smart business structure that can scale with you, the only way to go is up.

Article courtesy of Marcus Lansky, www.abilitator.biz