You’ve built an amazing product that really helps people. Now, you want to expand the reach of your tech business. To succeed with your scale-up goal, you’ll need a growth strategy.
Importance of using the right growth strategy
If your business goals are your destination, your growth strategy is the route you’ll take to reach it. Using this analogy, there are many routes you can take when you want to get from point A to point B, but not all of them are good to follow. Some might have you winding all over the place, while others could lead to dead-ends and make you start all over again.
This is why you have to develop a growth strategy that works for you. Every business is different, so some strategies will work better than others. When you know what you want to achieve, understand the capacity of your business, and see all the options around you, it’ll be easier to find the best course to take.
Challenges you’ll encounter
Developing a growth strategy will have certain challenges, especially tech businesses that tend to deal with more complex knowledge and processes. Being aware of these from the beginning allows you to prepare and decide how to deal with them.
Scaling your business model
When you’ve decided to grow your business, you have to adjust your current business model. What you’re doing now works with the size of your business and customer base. However, once you start to grow, you’ll be dealing with bigger challenges and demands that your current business model isn’t addressing.
Scaling your business model will be difficult if you don’t utilise the right tools and strategies. It’s not simply increasing inputs to increase your outputs. You’ll have to dissect every aspect of your business and industry to improve efficiency, productivity, and results.
Acquiring skills and knowledge
A growing tech company won’t just rely on tech developers and engineers. You’ll need people handling operations such as management, sales, and product development. You’ll also need human resource practitioners to source and onboard those people.
Be open to considering things like better marketing growth strategies. With this, be prepared to expand your knowledge because you will be employing various types of people to grow your business. They will have different skills, so you and your partners also need to have a grasp of those skills. This is so that you can ensure that you’re on top of everything happening in your business.
Reaching more customers
While this is a common challenge in any industry, some tech companies haven’t created a robust plan for reaching a wide customer base. Tech products are sometimes designed for specific customers, so if you want to expand that market, more research and development might be needed.
Aside from that, you may still not have a dedicated marketing team, as this isn’t always a major priority in the early startup phases. When you scale up, you need to build a team who will help communicate and advertise your product and services to the public. They will also work with you in ensuring that your products and services meet the needs of your customers.
How to go about it
Here are ways you can overcome common challenges and develop the right growth strategy for you.
Business analysis and review
Taking the time to study your business and the landscape it’s operating in will be worth it. Before you create a plan, you need to have a full understanding of how your business works and what your competitors are doing. It will let you see gaps that need filling in and areas that need polishing.
Understanding your own brand and operations also makes you think more strategically. For every action you make, you can easily recall your mission and objectives. Looking at the business from a long-term perspective will also be clearer because you understand how your business can move forward in the industry.
Strategic growth planning
After conducting thorough business analysis and review, you can begin strategic growth planning. Here, you’ll have to put into words where you want to be and plot the steps you need to take to get there. Being strategic and specific is crucial because there needs to be a clear direction that everyone can follow.
A MOST Analysis can be a valuable tool to use for planning. It stands for Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics. It’s both a checklist and guide because you’ll have to go through each one in order.
When you plan for your business growth, you start with defining your overarching mission or main goal for growth. After that, you break down that goal into objectives. This can differ for different departments in your business, so be clear with your objectives for each one.
Once the objectives are laid out, you have to match those with strategies to achieve them. Finally, break down those strategies again with specific steps and methods which are called tactics. This ensures that everyone is aligned from the mission of the company down to the tactics they need to implement.
Seeking expert advice
If the idea of scaling up a business is still new to you, don’t hesitate to seek support from experts. Those with experience can easily foresee harmful risks and spot potential opportunities. They have also grown some businesses successfully, meaning they can provide advice based on knowledge and experience.
As mentioned, you’ll also need a lot of knowledge and skills along the way, so getting experts on your team can be helpful. If you don’t have a huge network of business experts, Boardroom Advisors offers a variety of Fractional Directors that scale-ups can hire part-time. They have directors with expertise in strategies, marketing, and many more to support your business’s overall success.