Structuring any business for its growth is a very significant issue at the time of building any business for success and profit. Any business model in state/province/region can be restructured at any point of time for scalability, but the sooner it is done, the better it gets. Structuring a business for its growth is the most lucrative, planned, and the best thing anybody would ever do.
Entrepreneurs are likely to get very excited regarding the new business ideas that they have, and often jump to put those ideas into action without looking back to take the necessary time for mapping out their journey. This is a very common event with most entrepreneurs. Not planning out a fine route to achieve goals could be dangerous. Without taking the primary few steps that is necessary for structuring your business, you could as well experience self defeat.
It is always important to answer the whos, whats, whens, wheres, and the whys regarding the business and then it gets easy about how to structure and scale it.
- Who are the customers and who are you?
- What are you willing to offer? Is it any product, a service, or a combination of both?
- When are you going to do most of your work?
- Where in the state/province/region would you conduct the most of your business?
- Why do customers require your product or service?
After these questions have been answered in detail, you are then ready to start structuring the business for its growth. The art of any good business is to carve a niche, fill it, and then replicate the process as many times as it is possible. This is the reason why most businesses initiate in a small town, and then spread itself across the town, into the next, then in the city, state/province/region, country, and then all over the world.
Structuring the business for scalability is just the best thing that can be done, even if you are not willing to make it grow much. In the same manner scalability also affects investment. In near future, the job might turn out to be easy if you’ve got strong systems with proven functionality. This would automate the flow of your work.
Most businesses could be divided into two grouping; the lifestyle businesses and the scalable businesses. Not that one of them is better than the other, but scalable businesses are the propositions where one can invest. A majority of self-employed populace are engaged as advisors. Scalability is the ability to amplify the size of the business operation without any breakdown in its processes, or communications, or even efficiency. High scalable companies are usually characterized by their ability to enhance the capacity without any big increase in overhead. In other words, the highly scalable companies have nominal obstructions to growth.
For instance, a grocery store is extremely scalable. Simply by restocking shelves very often, and adding more checkouts, you are able to accommodate a big increase in your sales volume. Conversely, a restaurant cannot be considered as scalable, because it requires a huge capital investment for adding more kitchen equipments and space in the dining room. If a business tends to down, it is very hard in scaling back the operation.
How much scalable is your business depend upon the amount of investment. One day, you might wish to just sell out the business. Scalability would have a big impact on the amount of investment made in the business. For instance, we can consider the following possible buyers: individuals, competitors, and strategic buyers.
Individuals would simply use the standard valuation tools like those of multipliers of sales or discounted cash flows or earnings. Scalability does affect investment in any state/province/region.
Competitors would also do the same. But the only added disadvantages is that you would be exposing all your trade secrets to some competitor, and would be selling out to somebody who understands the market just like you. For such reasons, competitors are considered to be the worst audience for trying to sell out your business to.
You would only be getting top dollar for your trade from any strategic buyer. This is because they would be buying with an intention of utilizing their situation to transform your business massively in your state/province/region. If there is an understanding between the purchaser and the seller, the strategic buyer would pay much more than any other individual or competitor!
In order to understand the possible gains, strategic purchasers are required to see well established as well as documented processes that could scale to larger operation. This is utterly critical to get top dollar. Their strategy might be to use their expertise and capital to expand your business geographically, or utilize their distribution network for growing the sales of your merchandise.
What can be done to make business more scalable?
One can invest in scalable business. Scalability and investments are therefore interlinked. Each one affects the other. How can a business in any state/province/region be made more scalable? Given below are a few examples:
- Contract out the easily replicated parts of the business, like creation of components, to any larger company. This would reduce the overhead charge, and make that portion of the business more scalable.
- Simplify and standardize processes as far as possible. You would minimize training requirements for any new staff and are able to expand your team of prospective labor.
- Simplify the product or the service lines. How much intricacy are you adding to the marketing, sales, and other operations? Settle on the amount of contribution made by each of your product or service line.
- Create “self-service” approaches which reduce any need for human interference. Some examples are providing account information, online ordering, service or product notifications for keeping customers informed, or by improving displays for making purchase easy and products easier to search. Imagine any restaurant without a menu card or any grocery store except price tags? This is it. Just take it to the subsequent level.