Top tips on scaling up your micro business 

For many customers, close relationships are critical – they want to deal with people who know their name and who will take the time to really understand their wants and needs. This is something global corporations, by their very nature, can struggle with.

However, for many micro home based businesses, the challenge is how to maintain this level of service as you build on your success and grow the company.

Here are our top tips on scaling without losing that magic personal touch.

Have a clear plan for your microbusiness

This might sound obvious, but you might be surprised how much time micro businesses owners spend dealing with challenges in the here and now – sometimes so much that they don’t get chance to make a plan for the future.

But putting a business plan in place will significantly increase your chances of successfully achieving growth, so it’s well worth the time to sit down and think realistically about your goals. The aim is to create a plan that details where you are now, where you want to be in 3-5 years and what you need to do to get there.

What would scaling up mean for you? Winning new customers? Adding new products to the inventory or offering new services? Of course, this will need to go hand in hand with research into the market in which you are planning to expand. What is the customer need you’ll be meeting? How will you do this better or differently from the competition?

If you can, it’s a good idea to have some conversations with your prospective customers to get a better idea of what they’d be interested in buying. If you’re the kind of micro business that has very close relationships with clients or customers, it could be that this is something you can casually drop into conversation, rather than issuing a formal survey.

Learn to surrender control

As a micro-business owner, you may well be used to micromanaging every aspect of your company’s work. This may well have played a part in what made it so good in the first place.

However, having single-handedly built the business from nothing, many sole-traders find it very difficult to hand over any degree of control to others. But this is an unavoidable part of scaling up. As hard as it may be, achieving any significant growth will mean learning to delegate to other people and automate workflows and processes as much as possible (more of which below).

Automate non-core processes

However simple the core service or products a business sells might be, there is always a great deal of admin required in many different areas to keep things running smoothly. If you’re not careful, as your business grows this can easily spiral out of control and risks impacting the quality of customer service you provide.

This is where automation services come in. Whether it’s contract management, marketing, accounting and payroll, or just about any other business process you can think of, cloud-based platforms exist that will allow you to outsource these functions.

Ultimately, automating the processes that you don’t absolutely need to do yourself means you have less work to do overall, so your time can be spent on giving your customers the best possible experience, or on the strategic thinking mentioned in point 1.

Print is another example of an area where subscription services can help. With our EcoPro subscription, which allows you to spread the cost of operating a printer over a series of affordable monthly payments, all of the ink or toner you need is delivered when you need it, so you won’t need to worry about running our or ordering replacements. Meaning you can continue printing everything you need to keep customers happy without having to worry about the logistics of keeping your printer running.

For as little as £1.99 per month, discover how an EcoPro subscription could help you save time and control your costs on your print solution.