The best ways for female entrepreneurs to scale their business
Business competition today is fierce and female entrepreneurs do their best to succeed in the masculine business arena. Scaling a business initially is never an easy task for female entrepreneurs. However, their intuition and wisdom will guide them to find the right strategies to grow and expand their business horizons.
And it has become a lot easier for women in today’s digital world. Female entrepreneurs make a significant contribution to economic growth and poverty reduction worldwide. But female entrepreneurs face time, personal, physical, and social challenges that may limit their ability to grow their businesses.
Here are a few steps on how to scale your business:
1. Evaluate and Plan
Look closely inside your business to find out if you are ready to scale your business. Plan what you can do to increase sales.
Imagine that your orders doubled overnight. Does your business have a plan to handle those new orders without failure?
To grow your business, you should always be increasing your sales. Create a sales plan with forecasts and targets. The more specific you are, the more realistic your sales acquisition plan will become.
Then make a forecast of your costs, based on adding technology, people, infrastructure, and systems to manage your growth. You might need to find the help of a business coach for women to plan this strategic growth.
2. Find the Funding
Growing a business is not always for free. You may require staff recruitment, new technologies, additional equipment and services, and performance measurement systems, and maybe even management. How will you get the investment to grow?
Without investment, you will not have the opportunity to scale your business. Getting a loan or credit line is a proven way to fund the scaling of your business. If you’re looking for ways to scale a business, this is one thing you should consider.
Businesswomen often don’t like to be in debt. They love to self-fund the growth of their business. This is often the reason why their businesses grow much slower than those of men.
3. Automating processes
Automation allows you to run repetitive processes at a lower cost because you need fewer people to do the work. It is a lot more efficient. It also saves a lot of time. Automating is an important factor when you want to scale your business. And it is the first thing you should consider as you can already do this when you are still running a one-woman business.
4. Identify your target customer
Identifying the right customer will take time. But this step will lead your business to sustainable growth and a lot more dedicated customers. And it will also be easier to find them and convert them into paying clients. Two tips to keep in mind when identifying the right client:
- Pick one target market.
Do not sell to too many different groups. Understand your right customers and choose a repetitive, profitable, and excellent way to sell them.
- Sell to them again and again.
When you have found your ideal client and they are happy with your products and services, it will be a lot easier to sell to them again. It is also a lot cheaper to be able to sell repeatedly to the same customers. It saves you a lot of marketing expenses. Finding new clients costs more time and money than nurturing those clients with new products and services.
5. Find the right outsourcing partners
As you grow your business, it is essential to start to hire team members or outsource your work to other businesses. For example, in the early stages of the business, your core team will be a few part-time working members. When your business grows, you can start to hire experts to develop and streamline processes so that your core team can grow the business while maintaining quality.
6. Find a business coach for women who knows all about how to scale and grow their business.
Find someone who does it over and over with other businesswomen and someone who also has done it herself with her own business. Don’t fall for unqualified business coaches who promise quick success for little work, or those who have never even had businesses of their own. If you need help finding the right coach for you, check out these 20 questions you should ask a business coach.
Summing it up
If you’re trying to learn how to scale up your business, it’s important to remember that there is no quick fix to success. There is no magic formula, no shortcut. Every businesswoman is different, and what works for others may not work for you. You will always have to put in the work. It will not always be easy, but enlisting the help of a mentor or a business coach for women to guide you will help lighten the load.
Learn More
My name is Tineke Rensen and I am a business coach for women. I created the system “A Woman’s Blueprint for Business Success,” where I work with female entrepreneurs in 9 major areas in their business.
There are many out there who call themselves business coaches but have never had their own business. What you need is a business coach who has experience in scaling and growing businesses. And I’ve had plenty. In my 31 years of experience, I’ve become an expert in many areas of business. I can help you with whatever topic you need help with.
If you want to learn more about what makes a good business coach for women check out this article about the 20 questions you should ask a business coach for female entrepreneurs.
Are you interested to learn how you can work with me one-on-one to build your one-woman gig into a proper business and double your income within a year? Click here now to schedule a quick 15-minute call with me and get started.
About the author:
Tineke Rensen of Powerful Business Academy has been in business for 31 years. She built an international Outdoor and Survival business from scratch and sold it after 22 years.
Tineke was also a national whitewater kayaking champion.
She now is one of the most all-round business accelerators and mentors you can find. She helps businesswomen to “Scale & Grow, Make More Impact And Work Less.” There are very few topics she cannot help you with your business. Many people find this hard to believe, but hey, how much do you think you know about scaling businesses if you live it day and night for 31 years?
Tineke created the system “A Women’s Blueprint To Business Success.” She is a multi-awarded serial entrepreneur and is the author of the book “Maximum Business Growth For Women.”