12 strategies to scale up your business into an ultimate Unicorn
Million ideas to boost your business but where to start?
Starting a business is a wonderful idea. We all learn so much from life, school, and work that most of us have a great understanding of how to add value. If you can solve a problem using technology and can figure out a way to monetize it with a business plan, then you will be having some success.
The difficult part is scaling the business up efficiently. Understanding even Small Business improvement ideas can help you master the ways to improve business efficiency anywhere.
Unlike larger organizations that are better structured with checks and balances, starting a small business may give you more independence of action.
Business scaling strategies are very important to understand how to scale a business fast. The timing is crucial and hence you need to choose the best strategies out of the million at executing them at the right time to boost your business.
My Approach to Analyzing a Business
One way to start analyzing your business would be to create a flow chart of all the business activities in detail that ensures your profits. Try to classify all the work under production, marketing, sales, innovation, finance, etc. Even a home business like a Blog can be broken down accordingly to spur innovative growth.
If we could somehow construct a loop of the set of business activities that will ensure a profit, the next goal would be to amplify the loop. If you have everything else taken care of, you would be investing much more in increasing your Marketing reach.
Hence, to invest your efforts efficiently in your business you consider all the various factors, including the stages of the business life cycle, economic trends, changes in customer trends etc.
More sustainable cycles of this loop should give you more feedback to further innovate appropriately and consequently earn more profits.
Entrepreneurs should always be prepared to adopt the best practices.
- You could meet a visionary co-founder or teammate thanks to digital connectivity.
- Or you could even understand the needs of the consumers from extensive market research conducted by a third party.
- Even, testing a Prototype could immensely help in preparing for a product launch.
In today’s age, Innovation and Technology can help immensely in scaling up a business.
IT can help you build a stronger team, automate business processes and extend your business marketing reach.
In spite of all the latest global trends and strategies to boost your business, a holistic approach stressing the basics really helps.
A great business does not need to win all the battles to win the war. Sun Tzu’s strategies from the “Art of War” can definitely help your business.
Differentiating your product by focusing on your strengths and outsourcing the rest can allow your business to stay relevant in the future.
Here are 12 strategies that may answer your question on how to increase your business growth.
12 Strategies to boost your business in 2017
- Quantify sales targets & break the problem down to product innovation
- Prioritize by the Pareto’s 80:20 principle
- Get out of your comfort zone and explore
- Be prepared to adapt and not fight the current
- Why Timing is important?
- Business is about collaboration
- Understand the global market
- Build Strong Web, Mobile & Social Media presence
- Making Short Term & Long Term Goals to boost credibility
- Capitalizing on Fintech
- Sustainability and the need to help build a better world
- Protopidea: Connect with a Marketplace for ideas and prototypes and bring your collaborative innovation to life
The solutions to most problems faced by your business might be just around the corner!
12. Protopidea: Launching scalable products into start-ups
A lot of Entrepreneurs wish to be more involved with their core strengths. Rather than spending precious time learning to sell and market their ideas, they would like to work more on improving their product or service.
How do you solve this?
Outsource it to someone with a proven track record and experience. Protopidea, a Swiss-based company may have a solution for you.
Who is Protopidea and how can they help?
Protopidea which is based in the EPFL Innovation Park (EPFL | École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland), aims to support startups during its different stages of scaling up all free.
Aiming to connect skilled Individuals and Idea generators to co-found a startup or just expand a team.
Protopidea aims to immensely help innovators to collaborate and market their ideas to an audience. By leveraging technology to collect valuable data from the audience, they also help provide crucial feedback that can help innovators immensely.
The company is involved in developing tools and algorithms aimed at marketing an idea to an innovation-aspired audience. By providing a platform for your idea, Protopidea collects valuable feedback in terms of ratings and allows you to compete at a global level.
Additionally, they are hoping to further assist entrepreneurs with special guidance with Marketing or even Intellectual Property (IP) from a coach through an App.
A helping hand to overcome mundane obstacles in the path to entrepreneurship is a Win-Win solution for everybody.
Moreover, they even assist you to approach companies within your industry to sell or license your product or prototype. With over 2000 companies already looking forward to the innovation coming out of this platform, Prtotopidea is growing bigger every day.
The App that is currently under development is crowdfunding on Indiegogo. Pre-registration is available on the website, so you can be notified at the earliest when the App is ready for download.
Designed to run on Desktop as well as iOS and Android, here is a solution that can help you scale up your business into an empire.
Register yourself now on Protopidea’s website. Till the App is ready, do have a look at the below strategies
11 simple strategies to scale up your business
1. Quantify sales targets and break the problem down to product innovation
Establishing the desired targets quantitatively is the first step. To achieve you need to aspire.
Focus all product innovation in the direction of meeting these targets
Ensure innovation in every new project so as to meet the defined minimum sales or financial targets across categories and markets.
These metrics to measure innovation will allow you to invest your efforts appropriately.
Break a bigger problem into small problems.
2. Prioritize by Pareto’s 80:20 principle
As mentioned earlier, there are a million ways how you can boost your business. Everyone you know has some advice for you. I myself am guilty of this article. But the most important thing you can do to boost your business is to figure out doing the 20% work that will give you 80% of your results.
Don’t be surprised if 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. Or even if you manage to solve a big chunk of your problems by focusing on the most effective areas while ignoring, delegating or automating the rest.
Too much to do in too little time? Make a to-do list, Prioritize it and do the most important or easy things first. For the least effort you get rid of the most stressful things.
3. Get out of your comfort zone and explore
Mckinsey states it clearly in its article on innovation, that successful innovation occurs at the intersection of a problem to solve, a technology that helps to solve the problem and a viable business model that will help monetize it effectively.
Understanding the customer and his problems is important. Understanding technology and devising a mechanism to solve those problems is the key.
Failure is inevitable as innovation is a continuous process based on iterations. Developing and testing prototypes can help you to fast forward innovation.
Travel alone, go back packing, break out of your comfort zone.
4. Be prepared to adapt and not fight the current
Having a nice long-term business strategy is great. But even more important is to focus on market intelligence and adapt accordingly.
Lots of things change too quickly lately. Are you innovating for Tomorrow’s market?
Host up your sails and let the wind carry you to glory
5. Maybe the best time to scale up is today!
If you have started an innovative successful business then you better be figuring out a nice way to scale it up. A nice idea needs your 100% attention to see it go through to fruition.
You came up with the idea, you have an edge over others hoping to copy it. Until they figure out everything that you understand, you should be massively monetizing your idea. There is a reason you discount those future cash flows.
Timing is the Key
6. Business is about collaboration
Just like how you collaborate with your customers to exchange your product for the money, you can collaborate with other businesses too for mutually beneficial gains.
Finally, even if it is to enter a new market or just to get affiliated with a reputed brand, you can benefit immensely from working along with other external professionals.
Get double the work done with a great partnership.
7. Understanding the global market
Your product could be more desirable in a foreign market due to several reasons like higher volumes or a stronger economy. Scaling up could be much easier abroad in an international market.
Remember seeing a Zomato brochure in a Lisbon restaurant during a holiday in Portugal? With such rich culinary culture in the city, it was no wonder that the online restaurant review startup co-founded by a colleague from IIT Delhi would have spread abroad to the most touristic cities.
Proactive approach to internationalization can help your business become robust and more successful
8. Strong Web, Mobile & Social Media presence
Every business needs to have a strong digital presence. Apart from a nice website optimized also for Mobile viewership, digital marketing is a very important investment.
A strong social media presence that engages viewers with fantastic content can be the cheapest form of marketing.
Blogs educating customers of the product and the market are important for every business. Not only does it boost your business web page SEO, but it also helps you to make more sales.
Connect with people on Social Media to build stronger relationships.
9. Making Short Term & Long Term Goals boosts credibility
New Entrepreneurs starting a business for the first time need to understand that their venture is a long-term commitment. By consistently delivering over time, they can build credibility.
Short-term hurdles are expected in the volatile global economy. Being able to thrive and innovate in difficult circumstances can lead to huge future success.
Balancing your short term and long term goals will enable you to work on the long run
10. FinTech
Innovation in Finance & Technology also referred to as FinTech can really help you to cut extensive costs in your business.
Crowdfunding can allow you as a bright individual with bright ideas to acquire investment directly from the people. Even if you don’t receive all the funds needed, you can get something and pitch again with more innovation.
Mobile payments can eliminate the need for Point of Sale (POS) machines, that are not owned by a lot of small businesses due to the extra costs.
Cross-border currency transfers by Transfer wise is leading to a major challenge to the payment industry dominated by a few major players.
FinTech is changing purchasing behavior and enhancing business efficiency
11. Sustainability
Everyone loves a business that can successfully give more and take less to still be profitable. A business adding immense value is always liked and often garners loyal customers.
Any business can give back to society and the environment in some way. Even as a newbie blogger, you could just write about these topics and you will be doing something about it.
How Social Media went from being fun to serious business
Around 10 years ago in college in India, I believed that spending more time with my textbooks and lesser time fooling around on social media would be better for my career.
Today, as a Blogger living in Italy, a foreign country that leads the world in Marketing, I see things from a much different perspective.
Thanks to the Internet, I feel very fortunate for the opportunity to read and share ideas from around the world. I would have been less adventurous otherwise without the web.
With the rise in digital media, the flow of free ideas on the internet seems to converge towards better solutions.
Free ideas often get challenged numerous times. A Facebook post, for example, receives approval and criticism in form of Likes, Comments, Shares, and even Ignore.
For some strange reason, I can’t help but feel like creating a little Butterfly effect, every time I blog. Almost like I am able to influence the world every time I write about an interesting idea.
Of course, I do market my Blog very aggressively, often posting on comment sections across social media. With a nice title, I succeed in catching the attention of many busy important people.
But to be able to put a favorable idea in someone’s head is a skill developed from some aggressive sales experience. In today’s age, thanks to Social Media, I could reach out to anyone. The difficult part is knowing who to reach out to at the right time.
Hence, to scale up your business as fast as possible you would have to adopt the best practices and collaborate with the right people for the right job.
But you can also be anyone today starting a home business with some free time and a few basic pieces of equipment. By choosing the right business strategies, you can scale up to collaborate and also compete with bigger players.
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