Texas Border Business
By Pamela Kaur
So you started a business, your customers are happy, and you’ve added a couple of employees. Everything is fantastic. Or is it?
You find yourself constantly working. Forget a work-life balance, you don’t have a personal life.
The solution is to scale your business, so it can continue to grow. Without scaling, not only can your business not grow, it will stagnate.
So what should you do?
There are 6 key steps:
1) Well, you know you need to hire more people. But first you need a strong vision. Write down 8 key aspects of your vision.
2) Hire the right people. Make sure they support your vision.
3) Jointly create a scorecard to measure the pulse of your business. Have measurables for everybody.
4) Systematize how you do things. Document core processes, define measurables, and adopt the systems organization-wide.
5) Build a solution-oriented environment. Identify, discuss and solve all problems, challenges, obstacles, opportunities or new ideas. Maintain a list and prioritize.
6) Have monthly and quarterly meetings to assess the pulse. Measure the progress of the 3 to 7 highest priorities for the next 90 days.
Following these 6 steps will create a scalable framework to grow your business and also enable you to chase that elusive goal, a work-life balance.
Pamela Kaur is an Assistant District Director and SCORE Mentor, and in her real life, leads business turn-arounds and strategy for a hedge fund. She can be reached at pamela.kaur@scorevolunteer.org
SCORE, an arm of the SBA (Small Business Administration), provides free workshops and mentoring for small businesses. If you have any questions about your business – structure, funding, cash flow, budgeting, employees, marketing etc please email us.
