How Can You Make Your Business Scalable?

Scalability. It’s an element that we know makes a business more valuable when it’s time to exit, but also easier to manage on a day-to-day basis.

When it’s time to exit your business, a buyer wants a business that is scalable, because it means their investment has room to grow and it means the business isn’t as dependent on the owner that is leaving. On a day-to-day basis, having a business that is more scalable creates less stress as tasks don’t rely on key employees, it’s easier to train and onboard staff, and you’re able to make the best use of your time.

So, what is scalable? In our Value Realized Coaching, scalable is described as: Teachable, Valuable, and Repeatable.

It’s the idea that there are certain products and services that your business offers that can create more revenue, but without as much effort, especially on the behalf of the business leaders. And it’s an important aspect of business design, but today we want to take that one step further.

While it is important to make your products and services scalable, it’s not the only part of your business that you should look to scale. We often find that there are tasks in the business that should be scaled. These are tasks that need to be made teachable, making it easy to delegate and train, and need to be repeatable as they may happen often.

A few examples of tasks that might be scalable include:

• Onboarding new employees or even clients
• Client touches
• Answering frequently asked questions from clients and prospects
• Helping with service issues

Usually, these tasks are done so often that they probably feel very repetitive. You might even feel as if you could do some of these tasks in your sleep. And yet, in many small businesses, leaders are so busy doing the work, they don’t make the time to figure out how to scale the tasks. And it’s often easier than you might think to start making tasks scalable. For instance, if you’re onboarding an employee, it’s a great time to hit record during the training. What do you say? What information do you repeat often? What knowledge do you give to new employees without even thinking about it? Recording with audio or video, or sharing your screen allows you to capture your thought process and methods of delivery. Then, when you hire the next employee, instead of going over the same information for the 100th time, you can have them watch the video or listen to the recording and simply spend time afterwards discussing implementation.

This is just one example, but we challenge your business to take a step back and ask, what do we do often that seems as if we’re always reinventing the wheel? What can we make more scalable? You’ll not only be working on improving the day-to-day efficiency of your business, but also making it less dependent and more valuable when you decide it’s time to exit the business. And if you’re stuck, don’t hesitate to ask a BBG business coach for help identifying ways that you can make your business more scalable.