When you devoted so much time and resources, creating your app, an online platform, or a system, you can fall into a misconception that your work now is finally “done”. Where in fact, whatever you brought up to this world has to be continuously improved in order to meet the ever-changing market trends. While this is obvious for some, the timing which plays a key role here doesn’t seem to be so. Because when it’s the right time to scale your business?
Is it time to change my product? Is that feature has to be adjusted again? How can I know if it’s time to start improving my strategy? We try to answer all those questions in today’s article. Let’s start!
There’s always something that can be done better
It’s true. But it doesn’t mean you have to modify your product every two weeks. Introduced changes need time to pay off and generate results. After measuring them, you can make a decision to change or improve another part of your product. And then test the improvements again.
That’s how the work cycle on a product looks like:
Measure, change, test, improve, test, measure… and so on.
However, the question is not how but when.
If only there was a sign…
There’s more than a sign. We see at least 6 circumstances when you should start working on your business to be able to maintain high performance in the market. Have a look!
When it’s time to scale your business
1. Rejecting business leads
The size of your customer base is equivalent to your business stability. As time goes by the baseline will expand and so the amount of time and resources needed to maintain your clients satisfied. While you should accept every new opportunity to enhance the growth, it can lead you to a point where you lack a business workforce to take on another project or collaboration.
When you start rejecting potential clients because of a resource shortage, it’s time to take action.
One thing that you can do in this situation is to hire remote software developers. The remote workforce is less expensive as you don’t need to invest in recruiting processes or buying additional office space. They will support you no matter your location and offer much more benefits of which you can read in this article: Benefits of working with remote software developers.
2. Prosperity justified by profit in numbers
Being profitable alone doesn’t mean you have to scale yet. However, when you prepare a solid measurement and forecast of your income to predict the business condition in a quarter, a year, 5 years, that can help you decide. With a strong business model and accurate presentation of the future, you may want to start expanding your company.
Having repeatable sales and a stable customer base, there are fewer things to worry about during the process.
3. Reaching business goals with minimal effort
Setting up your business goals you probably make an estimation on the basis of the results of others, similar companies. Once you realize you start reaching the goals with almost no sacrifice in resources or budget, in other words, it’s getting too easy – you can try to scale.
Working hard to achieve a milestone is far better than achieving smaller, invisible in a bigger picture goal. Reaching smaller goals may be confusing because from one side we’ve made progress but from the other, it’s barely visible.
Summing up, scaling your business may help you identify bigger goals to aim at during development.
4. Having a validated product concept
Let’s quickly define what means “validated” concept. If your product was/is at the MVP stage, its target is correctly identified, there are people who are actually interested in using it and it solves their problem – your project has been validated by the users. You can read more about the validation process in the article on How to prioritize features in MVP.
If you successfully prove that the product will sell on a smaller scale, you’re ready to take it to the next level. Your product is the foundation of your company. Its quality reflects your standards. Therefore, as long as the company grows, the work on improving the product continues.
5. Building a reliable team
Once again we mention the team aspect. It really matters who you work with if you aim at the scaling phase. The people you surround your business with should be devoted and have an understanding of the goals you want to reach. They are an integral part of your success as they all work for it to happen.
Concluding, when you’ve built your team of reliable people you can start expanding your company.
Remember that you don’t need a big headquarter to grow your business. Your team doesn’t have to be in-house as there are thousands of talented developers who can support you from another country.
6. A sense of responsibility and control
The last one is certainly the key here. You can’t scale your business and your product line if you live in a fear of tomorrow. To be able to enter into the growing phase you need to be calm and make responsible decisions.
Most importantly, scale your business only if you are fully ready.
There were enough cases of people wanting to expand too quickly having no solid foundations. Be smarter.
Apart from that, follow your intuition
For sure there are other conditions when you may be ready to speed up internal processes. Here are just a few rules we consider fundamental. But don’t be afraid to trust your intuition. After all, it’s your company 😉
Andrzej Kopera • Sep 05
