The Challenges of Scaling Your Business
Scaling your business is one of the most challenging things you can do as a business owner.
As a business leader, you may reach a point where your company growth hits a ceiling, resulting in little improvement in profitability despite an increase in revenue. Adding another customer, employee, or location may even start to feel like more of a burden than an advantage, leaving you doubting how to move forward.
If you’ve started feeling like scaling your business is more effort than it’s worth, you’re not alone. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics:
In Australia, there are approximately 2.4 million businesses. Out of these, around 93% generate less than $2 million in revenue, while 4% generate revenue between $2 million and $5 million. Only 3% of businesses generate more than $5 million in annual revenue.
Of course, scaling your business isn’t just about revenue.
Ultimately, running your own business is about achieving freedom.
Before establishing Rolling Start, I was a shareholder and managing director of an organisation that faced many of the same challenges business leaders face when scaling their businesses.
Our leadership team worked hard, but we were just not seeing the results we wanted. Our strategy sessions were always the same: SWOT analysis, customer feedback, and a tactical plan for the next year. It seemed like we were just going around in circles without making any real progress.
Finally, it got to the point where we realised something had to change. We needed to find a new approach to our business strategy.
During our search for solutions, we discovered the Scaling Up methodology, which not only enabled us to approach our strategy in a new way but also provided a completely new approach to operating and managing our business. The Scaling Up methodology is a proven framework that helps businesses to accelerate growth and achieve their goals. The framework focuses on four key areas: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. By optimizing each of these areas, businesses can achieve sustainable growth and stay ahead of the competition.
One of the key advantages of the Scaling Up methodology is its flexibility. It can be adapted to suit the unique needs and challenges of any business, regardless of its size or industry or whether you’re a startup or an established company.
Scaling Up transformed our business, and now I want to help you transform yours.
The 4 Key Decisions You Have to Get Right
The Scaling Up methodology has proven to be highly effective, with over 80,000 organisations worldwide successfully scaling up their business using this framework.
Scaling Up is about so much more than increasing your cash flow and profitability. By aligning everyone to execute your plan, you can take a load off the leadership team, reduce the time it takes to manage your business by 80%, improve your company culture, and most importantly, bring the fun back into running your business!
But what makes Scaling Up so successful?
The answer lies in simplifying the business scaling process down to just four key decisions that every business must get right:
- People
- Strategy
- Execution
- Cash
By focusing on just these 4 Key Decisions, business leaders can successfully scale their business – no matter how large or complex the business has become.
Scaling Up: People
The success of any business relies heavily on its employees, who play a vital role in accomplishing company objectives and ensuring customer satisfaction. To achieve sustainable growth and long-term success, it’s essential to hire the right individuals (A-Players), retain them, offer training and development opportunities, and cultivate a positive company culture and work environment. Establishing a thriving company culture involves embodying and implementing Core Values and Core Purpose within the organization. Core Values can be seen as the soul of the company, while Core Purpose gives it a heart. These values and purpose should be alive and functioning within the business to foster a positive work environment and allow the people in the business to be empowered to perform at their best.
Scaling Up provides the following resources to help your business make the right decisions when it comes to managing people.
- One-Page Personal Plan (OPPP)
This tool helps business leaders align their personal priorities with their professional goals. By setting priorities in key areas, executives can achieve a more balanced and fulfilling life, beyond financial success. - Functional Accountability Chart (FACe)
This one-page document assists organizations in assigning accountabilities for company functions and business units while identifying people and performance gaps in the leadership team. - Process Accountability Chart (PACe)
This tool helps business leaders identify and assign accountabilities for the 4 to 9 processes that drive your business and align these responsibilities with KPIs to ensure their smooth execution. - Core Purpose and Values Discovery
A workshop to uncover the values and purpose of the organization, followed by a plan on how to integrate and activate them within the business to support overall operations and business goals.
‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ said the American consultant, Peter Drucker.
If you’re looking to build a strong team culture and scale up your business, contact Rolling Start today to learn more. We can help you leverage the powerful tools offered by the Scaling Up Performance Platform to accelerate your business success.
Scaling Up: Strategy
A successful business strategy should be driving revenue growth and increasing market share. Developing and executing a solid business strategy is vital for any organization seeking to achieve long-term success and sustainable growth. It is the roadmap that helps businesses to align their resources, focus on their strengths, and make informed decisions to stay ahead of the competition. Without a clear and effective strategy, businesses can easily become unfocused, leading to missed opportunities and wasted resources.
Scaling Up provides the following resources to help businesses develop and scale up their strategies, enabling them to achieve their full potential and thrive in today’s competitive business landscape:
- SWT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Trends)
SWT analysis focuses on exploring strengths, weaknesses, and trends beyond your own industry or geography, serving as a powerful tool for spotting opportunities for business growth. - 7 Strata of Strategy
The 7 Strata of Strategy is a framework consisting of seven principles that businesses should adopt to achieve their full potential in today’s global economy. This tool helps balance the complexities of robust business strategy while maintaining simplicity and coherence. - One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP)
This tool helps business leaders create a clear and concise strategic plan that outlines the company’s vision, mission, values, objectives, and action plans for achieving their goals. It enables organizations to communicate their strategy effectively and ensures everyone is aligned and focused on the same priorities. - Vision Summary
The Vision Summary provides a one-page format to communicate key aspects of the company’s vision to employees, customers, investors, and the broader community.
Ready to take your business strategy to the next level? Rolling Start business coaching will help you develop a solid strategy using Scaling Up framework. Contact us today to discuss your company goals, challenges, and any barriers you may be encountering.
Scaling Up: Execution
Having good people and a good strategy is undoubtedly crucial to the success of any business, but these things alone are not enough to scale a business. Without a solid execution plan, even the most talented individuals and well-thought-out strategies can fall short.
An effective execution plan helps to ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page and working towards the same goals, with clear accountability and measurable results.
Scaling Up Platform provides several tools for ensuring successful business scaling execution, with a focus on key metrics that drive industry-leading profitability.
- Who What When (WWW)
Business leaders can improve the effectiveness of their weekly meetings by summarizing who will do what and when, with a focus on breaking down larger initiatives into achievable pieces. - Rockefeller Habits Checklist™
This checklist sets 40 fundamental business practices that promote sustainable growth and success, focusing on routines such as having a healthy and aligned executive team, establishing a communication rhythm, assigning accountability for goals, and ensuring core values and purpose are present in the organization. - Meeting Rhythms
A meeting rhythm refers to the scheduled and consistent meetings held at different intervals such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, with a focus on execution, alignment, and updates to the One Page Strategic Plan. A successful meeting rhythm fosters teamwork, provides an opportunity to solve problems quickly, and ultimately saves valuable time.
By having a strong execution plan in place, businesses can set themselves up for success and achieve sustainable growth over the long term. Contact Rolling Start today and let us help you leverage the powerful tools offered by the Scaling Up Performance Platform to accelerate your business success.
Scaling Up: Cash
Effective cash management is critical to any business’s success, and this is particularly true when scaling a business.
Cash is the lifeblood of any business. It’s the fundamental reason why businesses can operate and grow. Your business scaling journey might even centre around breaking through a particularly challenging revenue ceiling or maximising your company profits. You can grow yourself broke, if not managing cashflow correctly.
As a scaling up coach, we would make use of the Cash Flow Story Platform, a visual tool that helps businesses understand their cash flow patterns, identify potential cash gaps, and take corrective action before they become critical. This tool also helps businesses to forecast cash flow based on future scenarios, allowing them to make better financial decisions.
The tools within Cashflow Story include:
- Power of One
- Business Value Indicator
- The 4 Chapters
- The Big 3 Cash Measures
Looking to manage your business’s cash flow more effectively? Contact Rolling Start today and discover how we can help you succeed. We love working with ambitious business leaders like you to find the best solutions for your unique company needs.
Is Scaling Your Business Worth It?
Scaling your business can be a challenging process, but it’s one of the most rewarding things you can do as a business owner.
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, standing still means falling behind, which is why it’s important to always be moving forward and adapting to the changing needs of your business. Whether your goals are to achieve greater freedom, enjoy your work more, or break through a revenue ceiling, Scaling Up can help you get there.
Scaling isn’t just about increasing revenue or hiring more people. It can also be about improving your company’s culture, purpose, and values alignment.
The efforts invested by our leadership team over time to implement Scaling Up as a business operating model yielded significant benefits, as like many others, our company was faced with a major challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and we were forced to implement work-from-home policies and restructure the business. However, because our leadership team had previously put in the work to align around a common language, culture, and way of working, we were able to navigate the crisis and emerge even stronger.
Today, the company is highly regarded, with employees reporting high levels of satisfaction, company culture and a willingness to support one another.
So, while scaling your business requires a lot of effort, it also offers you the opportunity to achieve greater freedom as a business leader, improve your company culture, and create a workplace that people want to be a part of. Even when scaling up may not always be about increasing profits, the rewards of creating a thriving business and a positive work environment can be priceless.
Is The Scaling Up Platform Right for My Business?
Scaling Up is a powerful tool for scaling a business, but it may not be suitable for all companies. Generally, it’s best suited for mid-size businesses with at least 15-20 employees and generating $2-3 million in revenue. For Scaling Up to work, you must have the desire to learn, grow as a leadership team, and be willing to put in the necessary effort and work.
Working with a Certified Scaling Up coach can help you find the right balance between scaling and running your business, making the process more enjoyable and less stressful. With the guidance of a coach, Scaling Up can be a fulfilling experience that leads to sustained growth and long-term success.
Scaling Up Business Coaches Perth
Brad is Perth’s only certified Scaling Up business coach and founder of Rolling Start.
We offer coaching for your business leadership team through workshops that help identify your organization’s core competencies, strengths, and challenges, and create a strategy and plan for execution. Our methodology includes regular meetings with the CEO and leadership team, logic and thinking testing, and monthly/quarterly reviews to track progress and adjust as needed, with a focus on rapid adaptation and iteration during execution.
Contact Brad today to discuss how we can work together to achieve success for your business.