Scaling Business Operations: 6 Proven Ways to Scale 

Scaling business operations is inevitable – as you grow, you’ll eventually reach a point where your existing infrastructure can’t handle the increased demand and you’ll need to scale up your company.

At some point, every business faces the challenge of scaling up. Whether you’re a startup that’s finally starting to gain traction or an established company looking to enter new markets, you need to be able to scale your operations effectively in order to continue growing. But how exactly do you do that?

In this post, I’ll be giving you a step-by-step guide on how to scale your business operations. While this material is adapted from a previous consulting arrangement, I think you will find it valuable during your journey as well.

You might be able to implement this with your existing team, but if that sounds daunting, consider hiring a world-class operator to help drive this process. Great operators enable scale and will help your vision come to life.

I’m confident that following these tips over time will help you scale your business operations successfully. With that said, it’s important to remember that every business has idiosyncrasies, so you may need to tailor these tips to fit your particular situation.

Let’s get started.

Scaling Business Operations

Step 1: Assess Current State

Take a look at your current operations and identify any areas that might need improvement. Are there any bottlenecks preventing you from achieving your objectives? Are there any processes that could be streamlined or made more efficient? This is also a good time to review your team’s skills and assess whether everyone is properly equipped to handle the challenges of scaling up.

The goal here is to get clarity on biggest areas of opportunity and recognize areas most in need of additional standardization, systems, and increased efficiency.

• Identify what’s currently working vs. areas of opportunity 
• Assess strengths and weaknesses of the business
• Learn how internal processes and procedures are currently working
• Identify bottlenecks: figure out root causes and the reasons why your growth has stalled. Is it a lack of personnel? Inefficient processes? Outdated technology?
• Identify systems and processes in need of tightening (are there opportunities to free up bandwidth and allow the team to spend more time on high value-add activities?)
• Prioritize areas and existing pain points to tackle first
• Ensure that proper operational controls and reporting processes are in place to monitor progress against goals 

Step 2: Create a Game Plan to Nail the Basics

Once you figure out the largest areas of opportunity, create a plan to prioritize your focus and look to evolve the foundational work already completed to date.

This plan should detail how you’re going to address each of the challenges you’ve identified and what steps need to be taken in order to achieve your objectives. Be sure to involve your team in this process so that everyone is on the same page and has buy-in for the plan.

• Create additional structure for standard ongoing processes (e.g., sales activities, P&L reporting)
• Free up operational minutiae as much as possible: generate increased capacity for high-value strategic work and critical operational activities
• Seek out efficiencies and create systems to minimize manual intervention and bottlenecks. Goal: repeatable processes to enable predictable results
• Focus on connection points and continuity between leadership team: avoid siloes as much as possible

Management Process & Operational Governance 

• Get a clear sense of what your upcoming goals are. Will you be pursuing an organic growth strategy or growth through acquisition?
• Create clear roadmap of critical goals and business deliverables you expect to hit in the next 12-24 months (being thoughtful of constraints and trade-off decisions).
• Enhance operating model and scorecard reporting to ensure you are tracking the appropriate metrics (KPIs/OKRs) which align with top priorities and drive specific actions/outcomes
• Establish a recurring forum across leadership team: track status and achievements, enabling meaningful dialogue about progress and obstacles
• Disciplined and organized approach to day to day operations – ongoing monitoring to drive accountability, consistency, and resolve roadblocks. In the past, I’ve found the framework covered in “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” to be an effective way to do this
• Automate Wherever Possible: one way to scale your business is to automate as much of your operations as possible. That could mean investing in software to help with tasks like customer service and accounting or hiring virtual assistants to handle routine tasks.
• Streamline Your Processes: look to streamline your processes so that they’re more efficient. Take a look at each step of your process and see if there are any ways you can simplify or speed things up. Sometimes even small changes can make a big difference.
• Outsource Non-Core Activities. If you find that there are certain tasks that are taking up a lot of time but don’t necessarily contribute to your bottom line, consider outsourcing them. There are a number of companies that specialize in providing services like customer support, bookkeeping, and social media management.

• Ensure you have a way to effectively communicate your strategy and ongoing progress across all levels of the organization
• Limit growing pains (as much as possible) as you scale the business by ensuring that there are clear escalation paths for risks and issues, and that communications are clear and aligned across multiple levels of the organization
• Data Driven Decision Making: improve measurement process and tracking mechanics around how we quantify performance, ROI, etc.
• Ensure you are effectively harnessing data – integrate data sources to provide insights, identify areas of opportunity, and leverage network effects (where possible)
• Fast feedback loops for continuous improvement – goal is to limit time between an action and your ability to measure the corresponding result. Allows you to do more of what works.
• Generate and maintain multi-year roadmap: translate strategic vision into specific actions needed to drive execution

Sales & Sales Operations

• Seek out efficiencies and create systems to minimize manual intervention and administrative workload. Optimize end-to-end sales process and free up time for revenue-generating activities
• Look to systematize / automate certain tasks or processes and take more administrative work away from sales
• Create documentation/job aids/SOPs to simplify repeatable processes and better leverage existing tools and technology

• Create evaluation criteria for sales team: objective measures to assess performance and identify improvement opportunities
• Produce product launch playbook: streamlined and predictable approach to coordinate future product launches
• Create repository of sales materials (avoid having to recreate the wheel)
• Potential ideas: address common customer objections, develop “sell against” strategies for top competitors, FAQs, training etc.
• Explore additional joint venture partners/strategic relationships – expand distribution reach with non-competitive, complementary businesses

RFM Analysis on Existing Customer Base (Recency, Frequency, Money)

• Answers the question of who will purchase next.
• Involves segmenting audience to figure out highest likelihood of response (helps you understand where to best spend advertising dollars on existing customers)

Build systematized follow-up marketing sequence

• Focused on leads that don’t purchase initially – if you don’t do this already, I can guarantee you are leaving money on the table.
• An additional benefit would be to learn why they didn’t purchase (common objections that can be addressed earlier in the process)

Implement Post-Mortem Sales Process

Capture lessons learned when you win or lose a customer: “what went well, what needs improvement, what will we change next time”

Focus on measuring results of all sales activities and E2E sales process

• Get clarity on leads/sales numbers coming from each sales channel
• Continue to refine positioning and unique selling proposition
• Use data to help inform testing and decision making
• Identify weak spots that can be optimized 

Customer Experience

• Your goal should be to create a world-class end to end customer experience
• Optimize onboarding sequence for new customers
• Systematic follow-up with an eye towards creating “wow experiences” throughout the customer journey (create raving fans)
• Continue to look for ways to reduce friction and simplify the end to end user experience
• Consider implementing referral systems for existing customers, if not already (encourage and incentivize organic word of mouth)
• Create evaluation criteria for customer experience team: objective measures to assess performance and identify improvement opportunities
• Implement Post-Mortem Process (same concept to what I included above in Sales section)

Analyze different buyer types and consider customer segmentation

• Tailored messaging to address the specific and unique needs of your various buyer demographics
• Age-based example: 50-70, 35-50, under 35

Create reliable method for collecting client testimonials and success stories

• Goal: build a large repository of client testimonials that can be leveraged for multiple purposes for credibility and social proof  
• Ensure team members are consistently asking for testimonials after receiving positive feedback from customers
• Recommend you start compiling video testimonials – video is a more dynamic and convincing medium; you can easily repurpose for multiple uses (FB ads, emails etc.)
• Boast.io is a vendor that simplifies the entire video collection process, nominal cost of ~$1K/year)

Create system to survey existing customers

• Valuable insights into what most resonates with customers and opportunities (can leverage for sales/marketing material). Examples:
• “Why did you choose XYZ company?”
• “What else are you interested in that we don’t already offer?”
• Assess if there is there an opportunity to offer a premium product offering to hyperresponsive customers
• Start measuring customer Net Promoter Score (if not already) and set ongoing improvement goals. Track on management scorecard.
• Ensure listening to customers is a top priority across the business. Enables not only great customer service but also an in-depth understanding of our customers
• Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly

Enhance relationship with existing and past customers

• Consider sending physical customer newsletter on monthly basis
• Generate repeat purchases (upsells/cross-sells), referrals, goodwill 
• Create reactivation process to win back lost customers
• Look for opportunities to transition business model to subscription program (recurring revenue). Will provide consistent cash flow and improve valuation.

Talent Strategy

• Key Tenets: continue to cultivate an excellent culture and make your company a great place to work, attract top talent, have high employee satisfaction/retention, ensure people feel valued, and have a strong focus on career development (invest in people)
• Compensation/benefits package: ensure we are market competitive
• Need to be very cognizant of maintaining excellent culture as you scale (this can often get neglected)

Enhance employee onboarding process

• Aim to make the process comprehensive, welcoming, and seamless
• Onboarding employee materials for new employees: background on company vision, industry, product specific training materials etc.
• Accelerate learning curve: role specific training materials to ensure understanding of responsibilities, help them hit the ground running

Facilitate relationship building across different functional areas

• As mentioned above, it’s worth doing all you can to maintain positive culture as the business scales
• Periodic in-person events: team offsites and community service activities
• Consider virtual team events when appropriate

Mentoring and Career Development

• Encourage leadership team to be a source of direction, training, and guidance to junior team members
• Consider offering formal or informal mentoring opportunities (could be as simple as job shadowing or being available for career development conversations)

Continue to seek out ways to invest in employees

• Ongoing training and development opportunities
• Ideally align individual interests with where we are gapped today
• Grow skill sets to increase contributions and job satisfaction
• Succession/growth planning: create opportunities for internal growth and advancement

Create feedback mechanism for employees to be heard

• Ensure transparency and open communication from leadership team 
• Consider surveying employees (annually or bi-annually; anonymous responses will likely provide more candor). Figure out what’s working along with current frustrations/pain points
• Consider measuring employee net promoter score (if not already)
• Conduct exit interviews with employees leaving (act on themes and make improvements)

Seek out opportunities to collectively work smarter and more efficiently

• Similar theme to what’s included in other sections – ensure job aids, SOPs, checklists, common processes/activities are well documented
• Reduce key person dependency risk – ensure you are not overly reliant on any single employee
• Codify best practices from top team members
• Foster a culture of innovation – encourage team members to find new, better ways of doing things
• Identify opportunities for time savings and re-allocate to high value activities

Ongoing Talent Needs

• Assess near/long-term talent needs and resource allocation during upcoming growth phases
• Make thoughtful business decisions around hiring in-house vs. vendor outsourcing (creating business cases to aid decision making)
• Ensure aligned incentives for employees, particularly around top performers (top rewards based on excellent performance)

Marketing & Advertising

Assess Current State – Deep Dive into Existing Marketing Strategy

• 80/20 Analysis: deep analytics review to identify the critical few things that are having an outsized impact on results
• Identify highest converting offers and ads we are currently using
• Identify advertising budget and all marketing channels currently used
• Get clarity into past results – understand detailed breakdown of how many leads/sales are being produced by each method of traffic  
• Identify what’s working and get visibility into improvement opportunities  
• Get clarity into your key numbers:

1. Cost per lead
2. Lead conversion rate
3. Customer acquisition cost
4. Average purchase amount – initial sale
5. Average repeat/recurring purchase amount (if applicable)
6. Close Rate (phone)
7. Conversion rate – existing client follow-up
8. Lifetime customer value
9. Results by targeting attributes currently used (Facebook)

Future State – Build on What’s Already Working and Scale

• Ensure you are disciplined with advertising and utilize direct response marketing principles – thorough tracking on all marketing/advertising activities
• Double down on what’s working (continuously seeking improvements) and look to optimize the customer acquisition process
• Relentless testing philosophy to systematically maximize ROI based on metrics and results (test and learn with champion vs. challenger approach)
• Customer acquisition needs to be systematic – for every $1 spent on advertising, we should have clear line of sight into ROI. Goal of predictability and sustainable growth
• Aim for close to breakeven (or better) on ad spend for initial sale. Achieving this helps enable scalability
• Target premium traffic: optimize for quality of traffic (prioritize getting high quality leads) instead of optimizing simplify for sheer number of leads. In almost every scenario, it will be worth paying more for top leads
• For Google PPC, determine which bid price will buy you 80% of traffic (hint: this will allow you to dominate the channel compared to your competitors)
• Continuously investigate alternate traffic sources to avoid having too much reliance on any single advertising platform
• Experiment with other modalities to reach ideal customer avatar cost effectively (i.e., what they read, listen to, watch)
• One area of low-hanging fruit I’d recommend: pursuing more free publicity/media coverage. Many companies I see are not leveraging this approach as much as they should be.

Test Multi-Step Lead Generation System

• Concept: offer valuable educational material (free report, audio, video) in exchange for email address opt-in (lead magnet).
• Builds trust and allows multiple email follow-up touch points to attempt to close the sale
• In many businesses, this provides a significant lift to conversion rates and allows for more efficient use of advertising spend. Once it’s set up, this is automated and does not require much ongoing effort.

Build (or Enhance) Email Follow-up System

• Implement a systematic, ongoing follow-up system for each lead that does not immediately convert
• Typically done in a coordinated 7-10 email sequence; after going through the funnel, it does not appear that this is happening today. I see this as a major area of opportunity to increase conversion rates
• Process Flow:

Traffic (Ad or Post on Social) → Landing Page → Collect Email → Follow-up Sequence

80/20 Analysis: Existing Products and Customers

• Analyze which products and customer types provide the highest contributions to your bottom line (not everything is created equal)
• Get ultra-specific on ideal customer avatar and highest earning segments – who is currently making you the most money? Law of 80/20 says 50% of earnings will come from only 1% of customers 
• If you can identify the 20% of any given audience which is likely to respond to an offer, you can stop wasting money on the 80% and market to the superior 20% five times harder
• Once you figure this out, it’s much easier to successfully expand to offline channels (i.e., direct mail)
• Use Case: for one business that went through this exercise, 4% of products made up 142% of profits (many products were actually losing money).

Systematically Study Competitor Ads and Offers

• Continually gain insights into what our competition is doing – learn how they position products, reach customers, and invest in advertising
• Quickly understand which of their ads perform and which don’t. Your bigger competitors have already undergone extensive testing – you can save time, learn what works, and implement into your campaigns 
• Research tools I’d recommend (if you are not using already):

1. Auction Insights via Google Ads
2. Similar Web: see competitor’s monthly traffic, which channels bring the most visitors, and where these visitors come from
3. iSpionage: see the best performing keywords for organic and PPC and how much competitors are spending
4. Facebook Ad Library: transparency into every active ad used by businesses advertising on FB

Conclusion

Scaling up your business operations can be a daunting task, but essential if you want to continue growing and reach new levels of success.

With careful planning and execution it can be done successfully. By defining your objectives, assessing your current operations, creating a scaling plan, and monitoring progress closely, you can ensure that your business continues growing in the right direction.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.