Hi , We are going to imbibe 4 golden steps to scale up your business, but before that let us come on the same page and understand the basic proprietary framework created by us, referred to as Scaling Up Framework, from hereon.
It is picturized schematically below. This framework can be applied to almost any task in your business and even in personal life.
Scaling Up Framework :
Task at Hand :
Scaling Up Framework can be applied to any task at hand, be it your business complications or your personal life. Let us take an example and we will apply the framework to it briefly, just to get an idea about it.
For example, imagine that you are working on the task of improving the presentation skills of your kid. Hence the ‘Task at Hand’ is “Improving the presentation skills of my 5 year old kid”
For Whom :
Of course, the ‘For Whom’ in this case is the 5 year old kid aka THE CUSTOMER. You are now going to think all the requirements of the kid, e.g. The process should be simple, fun, easy, effective and should include simple presentation skills such as a simple talk on any topic.
By Whom :
‘By whom’ in this case is YOU, the father/mother, the actual doer/planner. Let’s say, the basic requirement that you have in this example are : This should be done ‘on the go’ without much time spent on it.
How to DO :
This will be the actual process that you will follow to DO that task. Any task has two stakeholders, referred to as ‘By Whom’ and ‘For Whom’ in the above schema.
Now imagine the ‘How to DO’ process, from the their perspective.
How to DO (For Whom) :
e.g. As pointed above, for the kid, the ‘How to DO’ process should be simple, fun, easy, effective and should include simple presentation skills.
Let us say, that for a 5 year old kid the ‘Task at Hand’ which is ‘improvement in presentation skills’, does not even need to be conveyed.
Hence the process you identify can be this :
Plan a video with the kid on any topic of his interest, Create the kids own YouTube channel and upload the video each time on the same.
Now this is the HOW to DO process, you have set for the task at hand. It also serves you well because, say, the kid is anyway a YouTube addict!
How to DO (By Whom) :
This also serves your (By Whom’s) purpose which is : The process should be done ‘on the go’ without much time spent!
How to Measure :
Now take the next point. How to measure, as the name suggests will help you plan the measurement of the process completion.
How to Measure (For Whom) :
The ease with which he is talking while shooting the video and more importantly the improvements you see on this front as you go along.
How to Measure (By Whom) :
e.g. You decide that you are going to publish one video per week on the subject channel.
How to Motivate :
This step forces you to identify motivators for both the stakeholders.
How to Motivate (For Whom) :
The motivator for the kid can be number of views he has got and most importantly the number of likes that he has got.
How to Motivate (By Whom) :
The motivator for you can be the improvement that you start seeing in the kids presentation skills and the positive vibes that you see in the family. Of course, the views and likes received for the video can also be the motivator to you as well.
How to Automate :
Now this is a very important step from the scaling up perspective. How can you automate the process? Think of it from both the stakeholders point of view. From your perspective,
How to Automate (For Whom) :
The automation can be you teach the kid to shoot his own videos. If he/she picks it up then that will also be a kind of automation of the process.
How to Automate (By Whom) :
You can semi automate it using a normal mobile camera, every time the kid is having good mood to shoot. To take this in theoretical world further, you can also use inhouse CCTV kind of camera to shoot almost everything that the kid is doing.
How the Scaling Up Framework is applied :
Now let us understand how we are going to apply the Scaling Up Framework to your business. There are two main important points :
What Business is made up of :
Any business to the core is made up of three important stakeholders : Customers, Partners and Employees. (Partners can be your vendors, dealers, franchisees)
We need to apply the Scaling Up Framework and 4 Golden Steps to each of the stakeholders above to systematically identify the scaling up opportunities.
What stage the Business is in :
This is important because we should not scale up too early. This is a very important point to take a note of. Many of the businesses expand too quickly and face the failure. You never start your vehicle in 4th gear, it has to be started in 1st gear and the speed comes in picture later. You should never build scale at the beginning when things are not clear about your business.
So what is the ideal time to scale up? The short and simple answer is when your Product-Market Fit (PMF) is established. It is not necessary that it is well established, in fact it is always better to start on the golden 4 steps early on when your PMF is just established.
In short what we are saying here is we are talking about everything other than your Product or Service. Scaling up steps should be applied after your PMF is established, when you see the early form of traction. If you have already scaled up your business, its time to delegate at scale. But assuming you are yet to scale up substantially, let us take the next step.
Next Steps to apply Scaling Up Framework :
With all this clarity, let’s be ready to scale up!
The Scaling Up Framework will be applied to each of the 4 Golden Steps to scale up your business systematically.
We will be taking you through each of the four steps in next four lessons. All the brainstorming is done for those steps and you are going to get a ready made checklist/template to help you scale up your business. You will get FREE Assessments which will tell you where you are as a business w.r.t those steps. Use your score and the detail answers to create a SCALING UP PLAN for your business.
Let’s Scale Up!
Quite insightful!