5 handy steps to scale your operations without falling behind
With great expansion comes great responsibility.
Making new connections and supplying top-of-the-range services are key targets for agencies. It feels affirming to win new business, but while your company grows, your internal and external operations need to keep up.
It can be challenging to scale operations with a myriad of technologies and partner services to choose from.
Fear not, as here are five key ways to grow and stay ahead of the pack.
- Identify your niche…
…and stick to it!
One pitfall that agencies face when starting out is being ‘people pleasers’ – trying to adapt operations to suit every single need. This will stretch your business capabilities into areas that aren’t necessary and hinder your growth.
Instead, identify exactly what your most successful services are with current clients, define your unique selling points, and run with them. That way, you can focus your attention on what really matters and deliver the best experiences to those that you work with.
- Get your data right!
Data still remains ‘the new oil’, offering invaluable insight into your employees, leads and clients alike. Analysing data can help to best understand how you can tailor your product or services better to suit their needs.
However, data (whether customer-focused, financial or employee information) is often stored across multiple systems for differing parts of the business. Sales teams use one lead generation tool, the hiring team uses another recruitment platform, and marketers favour content management systems. Where do you start to collate this information?
Begin with an internal audit – how many systems do you use, and which are efficient in holding the correct data? You should limit the number of systems you use to be able to pinpoint useful data quickly and easily. This planning will also identify any gaps in where you need to hire to adapt to scale.
- Hire across the business
When you know exactly where you need extra hands, get hiring!
A growing business not only needs new entry level candidates to handle the bread-and-butter services that define you, but also more experienced leaders with topic expertise that can take your renown to new levels. Particularly when it comes to content marketing for lead generation. Many tend to outsource creative roles such as this in B2B –
84% of companies that outsource talent see content creation as the most useful marketing tool. So long as the data and processes outlined above can work for freelancers or outsourced workers.
Recruitment can either take place internally or through partnering with third-party hiring agencies; whatever is the most flexible and scalable solution to attract the right people for your business.
- Integrate helpful tools
We get it, marketing or sales stacks can consist of many useful technologies to benefit your operations. But these internal tools can be siloed. Instead, it is best to limit the number of platforms you use and integrate them so that data is cross-referenced.
There are useful CRMs such as HubSpot or Salesforce to serve as databases for client and employee information, as well as handling and tracking marketing distribution and activity with great integrations available.
Communication is key not just for your third-party vendors, clients and outsourced workers, but also internally. Messaging platforms including Slack can integrate with other web services with ease so that everyone is on the same page.
- Document everything
Multiple platforms, new employees, and growing leads add up to a lot of moving parts. But when scaling, you should not forget what your company stands for.
Defining your purpose and internal company culture is incredibly important. Be transparent about your core values and expectations – the easiest way is through simple documentation that can be stored as a resource for current employees and new hires. All communication can also be handled through project management tools to bring everyone under one umbrella or via a complete agency management tool.
Employees will appreciate a company that is not only ambitious in scale, but one that values all those that work hard to get them to loftier heights.
Start scaling today
Scaling a business can be tricky, but help is at hand. For practical insights on how to grow, fill out your details onthe form below.
