5 Ways to Mindfully Scale Your Business and Make More Money When it comes to scaling a business, it's best to seek advice from those who've successfully done it.
By Eric 'ERock' Christopher Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
The art of scaling takes some mastery. Companies don't grow by themselves.
If demand suddenly exceeds capacity, it could mean gridlock and death by success. Scaling up smartly is a critical balancing act. It takes a lot of skill, a little luck and it never hurts to follow in the footsteps of your predecessors.
Let's say you're starting a digital media company hoping to grow your readership to match and surpass the likes of Yahoo Tech and Business Insider's Tech Insider. Sounds like an impossible? Well, you might look to a company like Digital Trends, because that's exactly what they did.
Related: LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman: To Scale, Do Things That Don't Scale
Co-founders Ian Bell and Dan Gaul started Digital Trends from a shared love of home entertainment, cars and a belief that tech should be accessible and fun. Digital Trends is now enjoying its seventh year of growth.
After they doubled their traffic in September 2015 and followed up with their biggest year ever, they had to regroup to figure out where to go next and how to fix some "loose bolts" along the way. Based on their real-life experiences, here are some key lessons we can learn from for sustainable, healthy growth:
1. Establish a glossary of terms for your team.
This often overlooked step combats jargon, which creates confusion and inefficiency. Make sure you have a clear definition of all those terms that get thrown around in meetings and on sales calls.
Pete Jacobs, VP of integrated and content marketing at Digital Trends, points out that jargon words can mean different things to different people, and all the more to different departments. Make sure everybody's on the same page about your terminology.
"Seems simple," Jacobs notes, "but it can be very costly."
2. Define success on a company level and within departments.
As your company gets bigger, departments will naturally become more insular.
Make sure communication channels are open and remember a win for an individual or department may not necessarily move the company forward. So take the company-wide success goals and break them down into departmental success goals.
This ensures your productivity translates into goal attainment.
3. Invest in what's working best for you.
There's never enough room in the budget to do everything.
It's easy to imagine all the wild success you'd be enjoying if only you could spend a little more money. "With limited resources," says Jacobs, "don't fall for the software and headcount fantasy about what you would be doing if only you could afford it. Invest in the group making do with less and quietly getting it done."
By putting your money into what's already working, you're empowering the company's most competent and productive team members to go even further. That's going to get more mileage from your budget.
4. Be smart, but get lucky.
"We dodged a couple bullets in the last two years," Jacobs says of Digital Trends.
"While all of our industry was pivoting to video, we stalled on growing our video offerings. We felt like we were falling behind." Now, he says, many of their peers who chased video as their business' core offering have seen their valuations drop, forcing them to lay off staff members.
Related: 10 Ways to Make Luck Work for You
Though it was difficult and sometimes contentious, Digital Trends stuck to their process and held steady while other companies failed to fortify their web traffic sources or to properly monetize video.
Of course, as is usually the case with success, it wasn't just a stroke of luck. Adhering to core strengths is a sound business strategy. "Don't get swayed by what others are doing if you can't make it work internally," says Jacobs.
5. Make certain to approach acquisition soberly.
The goal of growing your company should not be to find a buyer. Remember that acquisition is a byproduct of success, not the definition of it. Growing a healthy, flourishing company is both the journey and the destination.
There isn't necessarily an endpoint. But if you're doing it right, you may find yourself catching your break in the wake of a five-year growth spurt, regrouping to plan how to deal with the next five years of success.
