How can you maximise your firm’s potential by scaling rather than just growing it?
Would you like to grow or scale your surveying firm?
It might be difficult for people to differentiate between the two terms. Despite this, you should note that the benefits they provide are quite different.
The purpose of this article is to reveal the differences between scaling and growing, as well as offer some advice on how to focus on the latter.
We cover the following topics:
How do scaling and growing differ?
The challenges of scaling your business
What you need to know about scaling your surveying firm
Final thoughts on scaling your firm
How do growing and scaling differ?
Developing your surveying firm
When you grow your surveying firm, you add new resources like people, offices, and equipment, which should result in a bigger business and higher revenues.
However, these new resources also add to your costs and squeeze your margins. Over time, you may gain 100 more clients and referral partners, which will increase your revenue.
These new clients will probably require more staff, so your costs will likely increase as well. Revenues may increase, but profits may remain the same or decline.
Increasing your firm's scale
In addition to increasing your profits, your surveying business also improves its margins.
The most successful companies are the ones that scale up after their initial development stage.
Growth alone does not necessarily result in higher profits, greater job satisfaction, or a more robust business. During these challenging economic times, it's especially important to ensure your business is profitable and strong.
UK private sector businesses numbered 5.5 million as of 1 January 2022, according to government figures. That's 1.5% fewer than in 2021.
Managing economic headwinds requires continually rethinking your business strategy and tactics so that your practice, your revenue, and your profitability are all growing.
The challenges of scaling up your surveying firm
Scaling your practice can be challenging. Especially if you had never heard of the prospect before,
When scaling up, lack of information is a key challenge.
It will be impossible to scale your business if you do not know which of your services is most profitable, which clients generate the highest margins, and where your most significant profit and cost centers are located.
In all areas of your business, it is imperative to utilise technology to gain timely and accurate insights into your costs and profitability.
Other issues include:
Taking on more than you're prepared for
Goals that are short-term rather than long-term
Not optimising your systems to scale your practice
One more challenge is focusing on growing your practice. You may not have considered scaling, so your mindset is has to be prepared.
What should you do? Instead, develop a mindset that focuses on scaling up.
In the following sections, we will discuss that.
Scaling your surveying business
When you and your people understand the difference between growth and scaling up, you can start putting some tools and techniques into practice.
The following are some things to consider and do.
Decide on your scaling goals
How and when do you plan to scale your practice?
Your practice's scale will be affected by how quickly you want to grow.
Consider where you will focus your scaling efforts.
Would you consider yourself to be, for example:
Do you want to increase your margins by taking on more clients and utilising new technologies rather than hiring lots of additional staff?
Plan on expanding your services to gain a larger share of your clients' wallets?
Are you thinking about opening new locations so that you can serve a wider audience?
You might want to scale up by becoming a human firm and giving your staff more autonomy and freedom to scale the business based on their own ideas about what your clients want and how to increase profits.
Scaling timelines should be included in your business plan.
By visualising how you intend to increase client billing and your firm's income over the coming months and years compared to outgoings, you can plan and visualise your growth.
Get in the mindset of scaling
You won't get your practice to the next level by doing what got it to where it is now.
A major difference between growth and scale is a change of mindset.
In the early stages of a business or if your practice is still relatively small, you might have focused on acquiring more clients and hiring more people.
To scale up, you must think beyond this.
You might pour resources into looking after a large client, perhaps one with an impressive reputation or one with whom you have a long-term relationship.
Are you getting a good return on your investment of time and effort?
Scaling involves analysing the figures to determine how profitable this account is, and determining whether you can increase your margins.
Boost profits by reducing costs
You and your team should think about how you can reduce costs (by automating processes, for example; more below on this) and increase margins (by providing bundled offerings to clients), as well as taking on new clients and growing your range of services – without substantially increasing the amount of money it costs to service those new clients and deliver those services.
Driving up revenues should be less important than driving up profits, and expanding your most profitable areas.
The solution doesn't simply involve making your existing staff work longer hours or devoting less time to each client to accommodate new clients.
As a result, lean, agile business administration and processes enable them to work smarter.
Every member of your team needs to start thinking about how they can offer new services to existing clients or take on more clients without significantly increasing costs.
Provide a broader range of services
Retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones, and improving retention by just 5% can increase profits by over 25%.
Therefore, you should consider offering new services to your customers in addition to your existing ones.
Additional surveying services and experience can help you gain an edge over your competitors.
By offering a wider range of services, you can retain clients and increase revenue.
Freelancers and businesses doing complementary, but not competitive, work can also be helpful.
Once you have developed and refined a new service for one client, you can easily offer it to others.
Invest in your team
You will be able to scale up your business by retaining and developing your own in-house employees rather than spending money on recruiting new talent.
It is also possible to increase your billing without substantially increasing costs if you train your employees so they are able to do more for the companies they work with (but don't be afraid to raise your prices).
There's no better marketing tool than word-of-mouth - and it's very often the most affordable as well.
An effective way of recruiting new clients is by offering existing clients gifts or incentives for introducing you to their contacts.
The companies you work with can be encouraged to recommend you by giving them vouchers, discounts and gifts.
Make sure your reporting lines are clear and delegate more
As their tasks and responsibilities increase, entrepreneurs may find themselves working harder than ever.
In order to scale up, you will need to delegate more and give your employees more freedom to make their own decisions.
It will be necessary to revise the structures and reporting lines you had when you first hired staff.
The more autonomy you give your staff, the more likely they are to make mistakes as they manage clients.
The key is avoiding a blame culture. Alternatively, how will you ensure that people learn from their mistakes and those of others without causing too much fallout?
Establish standard operating procedures
During the early stages of a business, it's all hands on deck. Team spirit is admirable when everyone in the company does everything.
You should document processes and standardise procedures as you scale up, however.
As part of this role, you may be responsible for onboarding clients, handling their enquiries, billing and invoicing, taking notes in meetings, submitting expenses, and managing annual leave.
In order to improve collaboration and ultimately scale smoothly, it is important that everyone knows how to handle these tasks.
Besides onboarding new clients (and staff) more quickly and easily, this standardisation allows you to measure income and expenditure more accurately and compare departments more easily.
In addition, you'll be able to see where systems can be simplified and made more efficient, speeding up procedures and cutting costs.
When necessary, seek external expertise
Provide your clients with additional support by bringing in specialists.
By using freelancers and outsourced expertise, you can expand your service portfolio and billing without significantly increasing your costs. You can also save time on tasks like marketing, admin and managing your workload through a virtual PA.
See how you can collaborate with experts in your business tax planning, surveyor technology, forecasting, business consultancy, sustainability, HR, social, compliance, plus market research.
Getting started with professional networks like LinkedIn and local business groups is a good idea.
When it comes to scaling and being clear on what you need to do to stay on track, using a business coach could be a good idea.
Automate your processes with technology
Technology can reduce many of the costs involved in your business's day-to-day running. At Surventrix, we've worked to ensure you can make your internal management and reporting processes more efficient and effective.
By automating some key processes, you and your teams can spend more time servicing customers and doing things that add to your business value and increase profits.
Tasks you can automate in addition to saving business costs with Surventrix include:
Compliance
Managing projects and instructions
Business Information and Reporting
Creating Quotations and Terms of Engagement
Scheduling appointments
Importing legacy data
Image management
Payment Processing
The Surventrix platform seamlessly connects your clients with your administration processes and surveying practitioners to join up and automate significant parts of your business. We do this by creating features of your practice inside our platform, which are then connected via the Surventrix Surveyors Hub process flow. This then feeds data into or out of the process at key stages.
Our approach provides simple business oversight, efficiency improvements, easy data access and regulatory compliance through simple automation and process adherence. It’s also highly secure for supporting your business too.
Keep an eye on the numbers
Key performance indicators (KPIs) and essential metrics such as cash flow, expenses management, staff productivity and profitability, client profitability, and client payment terms can all be tracked with accounting software.
When you have detailed, accurate, and timely data about your practice's financial health, you'll be able to determine if you're truly scaling up.
Cloud-based software can scale up as quickly and as cost-effectively as your practice.
For most businesses to scale up, delegation and decentralisation are essential.
It's still essential in every case for management to have access to essential information and to keep an eye on the practice's financial position on a regular basis.
Delegating authority without losing control can be achieved using the latest software.
How to scale your surveying firm in the final stages
“Our experience with dozens of companies launching businesses is that more than 60% of scaling efforts can succeed,” says consulting firm McKinsey.
Do you want to follow suit with that for your practice?
Scaling up requires a change of mindset as well as a thorough, cool-headed review of your entire business. In this case, technology is also crucial.
It is challenging to scale rather than simply grow, but it can also benefit you, your staff, and your clients as your firm evolves.
Schedule a demo of Surventrix today. Our experienced team will be able to set up a free trial of the software, and customise the tool quickly to suit your business requirements.