Understanding of Avatar:  The very first step of the framework for scaling a business is really understanding your customer. You may think you have a great idea, but does it truly solve the pain and problems of your customer? Before you go too far down the road of product/service creation, make sure that you have a great understanding of your customer and fill a need that is not being filled in the market.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Before you take the time to completely build out your product/service, try selling it. Do people buy it? What do they think of it? Does the product/service fill a unique need in the market? If you are simply doing a slightly different version of what is already out there, you will have a difficult time scaling it. You will be competing against others that are much further down the line in business than you are. Test your offering to see what feedback you are getting. Ask people how it is different than other things they have tried like it? What does it offer that other products/services do not? The point of starting to sell a minimal viable product before it is further developed is to make sure that you really have something you can scale. If you offer something and it is not significantly different than what else is out there, it will be a tougher nut to crack. Get market feedback to improve your offering before spending too much time fully developing it.

Marketing and Testing: Once you have verified and feel good about your MVP, it is time to really take it to the market. To do this, you need to make sure that you have analytics set up. Working with a marketing director can help with this. If you do not have much money to hire someone, you can use sites like growmotely and upworks to find contractors often times for really reasonable prices. It is important that you start by marketing with small dollar amounts and see how well the market responds. You will want to track to understand how many customers you get for each ad and make sure that you are making more money on the ad with new business than the ad is costing you. If this is not happening, then you obviously want to shut down the ad and try again.

Continue the work of testing your marketing and analyzing your marketing step by step as you bring in more customers.

SOPs: The way you scale your company is by getting enough business coming in so that you can afford to replace yourself other than the jobs that are most essential to be done by you.  This is done by writing out SOPs (standard operating procedures). Using checklists that are very detailed for every task that you do allows you to begin to replace yourself. Look for checklist applications to help with this. Process.st is one that works well. You can also use programs like trello to help with building out systems. The more details you have for your system and SOPs, the easier it will be to replace yourself and tasks you do. As you do this, you can move your work to focusing on the top skills that are most valuable to the company.

Scale: Once you have marketing dialed and your SOPs written, start hiring out for tasks that you can get off your plate. Ideally look for people that have a more natural skill set than you with those tasks. When you have the people in place and you know the marketing is working, then it is time to turn up the dial. This often means dumping more money into marketing that is generating revenue. Because you have the systems and the people in place, you should be able to handle the scale. Pay attention to feedback of your customers at every stage. This is going to tell you when you are on track and when you are off track. You’ve got this!