Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
This article takes a look at 15 business tips that can help any startup succeed without unnecessary stress.
If you just launched a business off the ground and you’re looking to grow your venture fast, chances are you’ve just entered one of the most competitive industries in the history of human existence.
Starting a business is usually the first phase, and what comes next is a lifetime’s worth of work (brainstorming, planning, replanning, retrying, failing, and strategizing) to anchor on success.
In the 21st-century business world, scaling is the next big thing. If you don’t want to work your life out for decades while your startup transitions slowly into greatness, you’re more likely to integrate some strategies for scaling that golden startup.
With that in mind, here are 15 business tips for startups to grow exponentially without having to fail (an unbelievable number of times).
Contents
1. Have a Business Plan
This is my number one essential business tip to all my clients – Get a business plan.
To scale your startup this year, you need to cook up a business plan. Before you launch out to start anything, have a plan.
A business plan guides you, so you don’t have to make unnecessarily disastrous mistakes.
What’s the purpose of the business? Who are your target audiences? What problem do you seek to solve? How will you stand out? What makes you different? How will you source funds to get moving or initiate expansion campaigns?
Scaling a startup makes things easy, and you’ll eat the fruit of your labour in no time. But the harsh truth is you can’t get far with the scaling process without a rigid plan.
Don’t just take my word for it. Take the words of the researchers who examined 223 businesses and found a correlation between having a business plan and making effective decisions.
They also discovered that a business plan drastically reduces the possibility of startup disbanding.
2. Know the Market
In your quest to grow your startup, you’ll gradually become familiar with the minor market trends as time swoops. But you want to scale, and you don’t have the time to wait for the eventual learning experience.
You’re left with minimal options requiring quick moves. And at this moment, you need to learn all you can about the market – fast.
Study the market in-depth. Have a historical and analytical record of the market trends (and behaviour). This will propel you to capitalize on opportunities no one sees. And it will facilitate your scaling process/startup growth.
I cannot overemphasize on this essential business tip – you must know your market to be able to dominate it.
3. Find Role Models
A wise man once said to me that only fools learn from their own mistakes/experiences; the wise study the mistakes of others and learn. It is better to climb on the shoulders of others.
Follow those who’ve done it several times and try to have them around you. This is one of the best ways to reach your goals – following those who have trundled the path (more than enough time to call them lucky).
In your industry, there are a handful of giants and great minds you should look up to.
While this isn’t directly shuffled in the scaling curriculum, it’ would go a long way in motivating you and your workforce.
More than being a servitude for motivation, you could get a swarm of opportunities by building meaningful relationships.
Build strong/healthy relationships with the top guys, and in the long run, you’ll have more chances at converting these relationships into mega contracts, deals, and (maybe) fundraising opportunities.
4. Integrate Useful Tech
The significance of tech today to aid startups growth cannot be overemphasized. Everything should be automated if possible.
This doesn’t only make for quicker delivery and functioning; it levels up your startup to bite on the growth rate of other top-notch companies in your niche.
Transitioning from the traditional way of getting things done to a more tech-driven way is a no-brainer. Suppose there’s a tech device out there. In that case, you can integrate to automate the process or anything else (or the payment system, customer outreach, or even the production procedures), then go for it.
You’re more likely to end up in the hamster wheel of a never-ending mild queue of old-fashioned, manually-oriented, and traditionally-civilized startups without a foothold on tech utilization.
Tech is the real deal for startups to scale nowadays. Although the tech industry on a global scale will gross $5 trillion in 2021 (at the time of writing), 70% of companies are currently working with tech facilities and fabricating plans to work with IT facilities.
5. Work with Time & Instill a Sense of Urgency
Create a sense of urgency. Give yourself and your team deadlines to get things done. Shun negligence and incorporate efficiency into your daily routine. You’re trying to scale and not grow naturally with the flow of things.
And scaling anything requires close work with the time factor.
“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” – Jim Rohn
The earlier and quicker you get things done, the more “next thing” you have to do, the more “next milestone” you have to conquer.
You first become a timely conquistador for your startup. This will rub off on other factors and even the excellence of your overall performance.
6. Consistently Create Quality Content
Have you heard the saying “content is king”? If you’re conversant with the internet and the digital industry, this is easily the classified code to the digital/internet console.
Build a strategy to provide content. This could be through a blog, a YouTube channel or your social media page.
Launch a blog for your startup, and a YouTube channel makes it more real. If you don’t know how to start a blog, read the extensive guide. You’ll learn to launch your blog, create content, and reach more clients by capitalizing on content marketing.
Initiate a content marketing campaign and delegate competent experts in your staff arsenal to get the activities rolling. Content is king. And just by leveraging on creating quality content consistently in the long run, you’ll be able to scale exponentially.
According to stats, a brand’s social media presence influenced the purchase decision of 73% of customers looking to initiate a buy order.
Whether it’s social media, a blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel/vlog, content creation is more like the startup-scaling steroid.
7. Study the Market & Know Your Clients
Getting to know your audience is one step to achieving excellence in service delivery and scaling pretty fast into success.
You serve them better when you know them instead of when you’re clueless about what they want (or need), where their pain point is and what they’d like to be served.
Identify the challenges and deliver the best solution there is. Your startup would be meaningless without the need to serve and procure remedies in the first place (to remedy clients’ pain points).
Again, you need to know where your clients are, their bio-data, and a lot more about them.
By garnering these details in hits, you’re able to reach them more efficiently, seize on their interest, and devise a strategy to convert them from random clients to loyal buyers.
8. Solve Clients’ Problems
As a startup looking to scale the process, one of your available lifelines is to provide relevant and quality solutions to problems your clients face.
Do this consistently, and you’ll bustle up to become a startup hardly replaceable. Every business exists for a reason – to provide value.
Whether it’s services or consumables you’re into, the odds that you’ll be feeding critical value to the market are high as mount Everest.
And one of the best ways to keep up with executing strategies that handle clients’ pain points is to know what exactly the problem is.
To scale any startup, providing practical solutions/remedies to problems (and challenges) customers put up with must be re-engineered towards quality and efficiency.
Recommended Read: Solved: How To Understand And Solve Your Customers’ Problems
9. Avoid Compromising on Quality Delivery
When it comes to quality, give your best. You want to keep your reputation as a firm known for quality delivery.
But if you subsidize that or alternate quality for quantity and prioritize profit-making, you’ll throttle your startup to the layers of mediocrity.
Your goal is to scale and not give clients the wrong impression about your services and overall outlook while you milk them with all sorts of sales speeches and pitches.
Compromising on quality in the long run (and maybe the short run) will likely damage your reputation and ruin your long-term objectives.
10. Recruit Competent Minds
So the truth is, nothing works excellently with a team of newbies. Did you found a great company or startup? Chances are, the team behind the success you adore has top-level expertise and inculcates a consciousness of excellence.
If you want to grow your business at startup speed, outsource critical and delicate responsibilities to brilliant minds who can get things done with little or no supervision.
Don’t look forward to working with people who want to be with you for a short period. Recruit a team of staff you can draft a long-term (five-year) plan with.
This is significant as you need all hands on the desk and don’t want to worry about unnecessary staff resignation anytime soon.
11. Build the Happy-Team
Be a leader and not a boss. Build a happy team and have them put their best into what they do.
Did you know that happy employees are 12% more productive than unhappy ones, and unhappy employees bring 10% less productivity into their workplace?
If your goal is to move your startup pretty fast, then your best bet should be on building camaraderie – a presence and atmosphere of unity.
Nobody wants to be bossed around, and you’ll stream more productive ideas off your employees when everyone’s happy. Regardless of your staff or team’s skill set and level of experience, nothing replaces working in harmony and happiness.
12. Communicate Your Vision
Much more than working with the happy team, you need to communicate a shared vision across the different units of your startup.
It’s not enough to have a vision of your own; if your staff and partners don’t understand your vision and how you plan to reach your goals, they might not be motivated to work so hard.
Your goals shouldn’t be your goals alone – it should be shared and understood. Working in synergy (with a shared vision in mind), it’s a lot easier to scale a startup from grassroots to the mountaintop.
13. Take Risks
I mean… it’s risky not to take risks. Risks are the carcass of success and failure. You can’t be too sure; you can’t be sure… you can’t “not” be confident.
It’s a risk!
You’re not armed with innate capabilities to foretell the future or the outcome of an action before you execute it. This alone is a risk.
And in times where you have an idea as to how an outcome could play out, you certainly can’t determine the scope, coverage, and extent of impact (precisely).
This doesn’t mean you should dabble into making redundant decisions. Vet your options carefully (accompanied with market/historical analysis), mitigate the options that could impoverish your startup, and then consult more experienced minds.
But take risks and don’t be scared to make mistakes. If you fail, you’ll learn to not fail in such a manner. If you succeed, you’ll learn to succeed in that direction and scenario every time.
It might look like a win-win for you, but some wins will leave you enough scars for a lifetime. All in all, it’s part of learning and evolving.
“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” – Miles Davis
14. Think Big
This isn’t the conventional Cookie-cutter quote you’ve heard since the last two decades. For real, think big and plan big.
Your goals should be cutting-edge unless you want to end up like the bandwagon of mediocre startups that never see the light of success.
Do you want to scale? Great. Have high goals and standards. It’s no crime to desire success at its peak. The best part? Thinking big and having a great vision motivates you to work like nothing else does.
15. Capitalize on What Works
Working strategies aren’t easy to fabricate. But if you find one with a track record of blinding results, capitalize on it.
To get better results, cobble up better “working” strategies. Run modifications, rinse and repeat the process. From experience, by repeating a working strategy over a period of time, you’ll hit success quicker than ever.
Consistency is key, and leveraging on strategies that have proven to be successful in previous times is a foolproof tactic to scaling your startup significantly.
Conclusion
Capital isn’t everything. And in the art of scaling a startup, you’re more into outsourcing than financing.
To scale a startup from scratch, you need a happy and intelligent team, big goals to keep you motivated, a shared vision to facilitate working in synergy, knowledge of the people you’re out there to serve, a funnel of delivering a relevant solution to your client’s problems, and lastly – recalibration and implementation of strategies that worked.
Growing a business doesn’t have to take forever. You don’t have to do everything yourself. To make significant progress, outsource responsibilities and take risks.
And don’t even think to promote the spirit of compromise – opt for quality at all times and watch your startup scale elastically like a piece of stretch fabric.
