There’s a lot of talk about scaling businesses right now, but what does scaling actually mean?
Honestly, it can be different for each business, but in this online business world it tends to mean creating the structure, systems and support to offer a program at volume to your customer, without affecting the quality of delivery and without you having to do more work. In fact ideally it means you can step back, while revenue increases.
I’ve been scaling my business over the last couple of years, and I’ll be honest. It’s not easy. There are so many elements to consider and it doesn’t always go to plan.
So I thought it might be useful if I shared my top tips for scaling a program.
1. Test something first a few times before you attempt to scale it. Once you scale something you will have it as a core part of your offers for some time, so ensure that:
(a) It delivers results.
(b) It feels like something you’re excited about and want to deliver for some time (nobody wants to be stuck delivering something they’ve fallen out of love with).
(c) There’s a big enough market need for it.
2. Get dialled in on both your ideal paying customer for the program, and your messaging. Go deep with this work as it HAS to connect to the right people to get the results. And results mean everything as they will make it easy to keep selling the program over and over.
3. Ensure you have an audience full of your ideal paying customer for that program. If you don’t, it will be really hard to scale right off the bat as you simply won’t have enough leads. And if you don’t, spend time building up and nurturing that audience first. Or look at potential joint ventures or affiliate options to make the most of other audiences.
4. Ensure you have the internal structure and support to scale. You need a slick onboarding system, retention system, feedback system, off boarding system and so on, to keep it running like clockwork (and this is before any of the launch or funnel work). Having the right team to help you run it is key, which could mean other coaches to support, someone to run things like facebook groups, a customer service person, an onboarding person, for example.
5. Ensure you have an improvement and innovation process in place where you get regular feedback on the program. I have a quick survey after each module. I then analyse that monthly to spot trends and gaps. We should always be improving and innovating and this insight is gold dust for that! You want to create the best customer experience you can, and this can help drive that.
6. Be clear on your recruitment model for the program. With my mastermind I still rely on launches, and plan one twice a year. That said I still collect a waitlist in-between these times and if there is space, I can add people in during that time rather than make them wait. For my signature program, I have an evergreen funnel running all the time.
7. Create other offers that warm your customers up to your scaled offer. So for instance neither of my scaled offers are great for people just starting out with no financial backup. The investment is too high and they need to progress further in their business until they’re at the level for this support. So I have other offers that can help them with where they are now, with a clear path that will lead them to my scaled programs later.
8. Create content and funnels that bring people into your programs naturally. Again they may need to be nurtured for a while, I have a few people in my mastermind who have been in my world for up to 2 years. My general stance on this is ‘always be nurturing’.
Those aren’t exhaustive as scaling can be a complex beast and the structure can differ from business to business, but I hope those tips give you a few ideas about how you can scale your business.
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