6 Easy Tips To Scale Your Home-Based Business & Increase Revenues, Profits

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The big brands of today were once sitting under garage roofs and in basements! This sums up the importance of scaling a new business with time. The genesis of a successful startup lies in a vision that challenges its own competencies to keep going strong. Though being a home-run business, it is recommended to register your business as a private limited company or an LLP. Government’s focus on promoting “ease of doing business” and the emergence of affordable online service providers for business professional services have made running a business in India simpler than ever.

Here are a few pointers for scaling your home-based business to hights:

Go local before Glocal

You may start aiming for the stars but the base is where your roots are. Which means, you must first capture the local market. Try being a local hero and gauge your offerings as compared to local competitors and know where you stand in the market.

This is because your local laws may vary and you will have to fight another battle when you venture out. Even Uber and Airbnb faced the wrath of legal opposition while scaling up. Try roping in business professional consultants early on to avoid legal hassles while setting up a new business.

Create a holistic scale-up plan

Plenty of factors contribute to the success of the business and you will need to expand each one for substantial growth. This includes ballooning operations, QA, legal and management team across different phases. They all should collectively be able to cater to the expansion of demands.  Also, there is no way you can compromise service quality because the new customers expect the same service that grew your business.

A massive level scale-up may also derail your existing process wherein any particular team may fall short of the required standard. This may be due to a higher workload, structural changes, and even lack of experience with your working pattern. Such hiccups turn the clients off and hamper the brand image first and then the profits. Be it specializing in any vertical and/or expanding it, a new market will require new people and a new team who is dynamic enough to tackle new challenges.

Keeping it legally compliant

You don’t want to miss out on creating a brand out of your home-based business. This is what millions of business owners dream of, globally.  You will gradually move to complete the pre and post incorporation compliance. Right from solving the dilemma of whether to register private a limited company or an LLP or any other structure for that matter to protect the brand by creating intellectual property.

And as you expand your business, you tend to hire more people and they are spread across cities or perhaps the world.  This means you will need to have an employee retention policy in place to keep them motivated and committed towards your business. Gradually, the expansion will demand funds and you may be going to investors for that. Being compliant will help to convince prospective investors to chip in with their funds.

Study Numbers for Analyzing Market Demand

One of the big mistakes that small business entrepreneurs make is scaling haphazardly, ignoring the natural flow of expansion. With a burning desire to grow fast, businesses tend to jump into new markets without properly analyzing the situation or taking any surveys. They spread themselves too thin by extending beyond their actual capacity. Start with looking at your sales chart and compare it to the competitors and industry standards for evaluating your growth.

Ensuring that there’s enough demand for what you are supplying is an ideal way to start with. Start analyzing the past sales data, the competition data, and the whole industry at a larger scale to see where your business stands. Collect as much data as possible for sustainable growth of a new branch or outlet that you are opening.  Read numbers, analyze them and see what they tell you – not what you want to see in them. A viable data-backed decision is always the best bet before entering a new market.

Try Leveraging People’s Assets

The market is experiencing a surge in service-based business models like Airbnb, Ola, Uber, Lyft, and Soothe. What’s the one thing that is in common with them? They are leveraging assets owned by other people, backed by robust and agile technologies. Uber owns no car just like how Airbnb owns no real estate. It’s just the way how these companies have structured their business model around people’s assets.

The key is in utilizing underutilized resources. They come at a lesser cost. And then marketers are creating demand through inventive apps and software. This is the modern way to scale up quickly. Try tapping in such assets as you don’t have to worry about investing capital or even equipping other resources to grow your business. This does not mean you start a business based on the same idea just to capitalize on assets available in the market. But there must be an option and you should look for other alternatives when you are scaling up.

Leverage Technology

It’s a boon to have the technology by your side and this holds true for startups looking to cross borders while sitting in their own office (or even shared space for that matter!). What could you possibly do to increase your reach? Create a website? Social Media? Partner with vendors at different locations and team it up on tools like Asana, Basecamp, etc.? The scope is endless and you practically have an entire horizon to explore.  

Finding alternatives to connect to clients and providing delivery is another way to expand while still being a home-based company. There are multiple aspects to being a home-grown entrepreneur like encouraging community growth by tying up with similar-service vendors or even selling the stuff online to start an eCommerce business.

Have you tried going global for your home-based business? If so, do share your experiences, hurdles and other pro-tips. My story is somewhat similar wherein I tapped on technology and skilled resources to expand business reach. And LegalWiz.in is now a leading business professional services provider in India catering to more than 5000 clients pan India and adding more value to their business, every day.