Think big! 7 smart steps to scale your business successfully

To scale your business successfully, try these seven helpful tips from Open Pantry founder and CEO, Geoff Philcox.

7 tips to scale your business

1. Think BIG

The first piece of advice I would share with any business owner who is keen to scale is essentially simple: think BIG. What’s stopping your business from expanding to every state? To every country?

Unfortunately, we all have unconscious limitations that we impose on ourselves when it comes to the way we think about scale. How big is big is different to everyone, depending on those limitations.

Think of how you can make your product or service national first – then think one step further to consider how you can make it global. Then, when it comes to building your product or service, this will be in the back of your mind and you will automatically work backwards and plan your products and services with that level of scale in mind.

I have used this type of thinking to help build our latest software venture – Open Pantry. We built the technology with scale in mind, so there is no difference to our system whether we have 100 or 100,000 customers. Because of that approach, our strategy to roll out to nine other countries in 2023 will take less than a month.

2. Test markets in two easy steps

If you want to expand to another country or have an idea for a new product or a service, you should ‘validate before you create’. Common sense, right? But not enough people apply it.

For example, let’s say that you want to start an online clothing brand. You have some prototype designs and some modelling shots. Before you go and purchase a container of stock, testing your market first means that you would first check to see if those items would sell in those markets.

With current technology, this has become easy to do. Here’s how:

Step 1. Set up your store:

• Purchase a domain name from your preferred domain seller.
• Use shopify.com.au (free trial) and choose a free theme.
• Personalise your theme and add your products and pictures (hire someone from fiverr.com, if you don’t want to do it yourself).

Step 2. Run ads

• Set up a TikTok for Business account. It’s not all kids anymore – 40 per cent of users are older than 30, and it’s cost-effective too!
• Create some basic ads using your images and some simple copy – you’ll easily find plenty of info on this on YouTube. All this can be achieved within an hour.
• Next? Run the ads and see if people engage. Are they adding to the cart? Are they clicking? Disallow the purchase at the final stage, but if sufficient levels of customers are making it through, consider your business idea validated.
• Proceed to purchase stock and really sell it!

3. Work on building processes, not on tasks

Build processes that make tasks easier or even fully automated. My first company, Kitchen Mate, involved a lot of manual work, including looking up information to do comparisons. I decided early on to build a search tool that would quickly search for products and do a comparison. The tool took a very long time to create, but it has streamlined the process and saved countless hours on repetitive tasks.

At Open Pantry, every aspect of the business process is automated, complete with various triggers to guide customers through our system smoothly and successfully. There are more than 45 different triggers for 45 different scenarios. The lengthy set-up time was worth the effort, and it means that we can now rely on the process and scale quickly and efficiently.

4. Know your metrics (in particular, customer lifetime value and cost-per-acquisition)

$2,283 is the lifetime value of an Amazon customer. Did you know that? This is the total revenue Amazon makes on average per customer. By understanding this, you can then work out the limit you can spend on acquiring a customer. For example, the average profit on the lifetime value of an Amazon customer is $600.

So, spending $500 to acquire a customer makes $100 profit over the lifetime of that customer. When it comes to scaling, you need to be sure of what these numbers are – and then have the confidence to be guided by them.

5. Use other people’s money

My first business was built from the ground up using my own money. I was the sole owner, but, looking back, I still remember it as the most stressful time of my life. I was doing tasks that should have been outsourced, and it meant growth was slow.

To compare, having an investment of other people’s money means that your energy and resources are spent in different ways – including hiring for tasks and accessing high-level thinking. Each state has their own Angel investor group that specialises in early-stage funding. For Victoria, check out melbourneangels.com.

6. Understand your customer

When it comes to your customers, you need to understand them. That means understanding their needs, their pain points, and their wants.

By creating personas and analysing customer journeys, you can better understand these customers – including where to advertise to engage with them effectively – and put yourself in a stronger, more strategic position.

7. Focus on yourself – not the competition

It is too easy to be too obsessed with what the competition is doing – and you risk becoming a worse version of them.

Instead, switch your focus to yourself and your customers. What can you do to delight them? What can you do to create the most value? Check in on your competitors sporadically but remember that for sustainable growth and genuine success, you should always be looking forward.

Want more? Get our newsletter delivered straight to your inbox! Follow Kochie’s Business Builders on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.