How to scale a business

March 11, 2020

I love growing businesses, but scaling them is way more fun 🙂

What’s the difference between ‘scaling’ and ‘growth’?

GROWTH is where you add resources at the same rate as you’re adding revenue.

SCALE is about adding resources at an incremental rate to the rate of your revenue growth.

Growth is hard. But scaling is harder.

Why?

Because you need to be SMARTER with the kind of revenue you bring on, with the products / services you sell, and with how you manage the business to get more out of your resources while driving extraordinary growth.

What does it take to scale up a business?

You need a marketing machine that brings new leads into your sales machine around the clock.

You need a sales machine that converts those leads into revenue at an above average rate.

You need a revenue model that has net positive growth every month (recurring revenue models are best for this).

You need to deliver an awesome product / service that people love so your attrition rate (aka churn rate) stays low.

And you need to manage the business effectively so you keep costs low as a percentage of your revenue growth.

So yeah…

It’s DAMN HARD to scale a business but it’s the ultimate goal of all fast-growing companies (and what any business looking to drive massive growth should be going for as well).

Alex Cleanthous

Director of Strategy + Innovation | Co-Founder at Webprofits

I co-founded Webprofits in 2006 with the belief that there's always a smarter and better way to do things. We're now a digital growth consultancy with offices in Australia, Singapore, and the United States. I'm passionate about personal and professional growth, and I like to surround myself with people who are as well. I have substantial private board experience, and have successfully launched an IPO.

Newsletter Sign up

Get access to 95% of my best life hacks.

Subscribe to the latest lessons for business success.