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Scaling your business depends on two factors: your company’s capability and its capacity to deal with growth.

To scale up your business, your company must be capable of dealing with a growing amount of work or sales and of doing it cost-effectively.

You need to know that your company can achieve exponential growth without costs rising as a result. It’s vital too, that performance doesn’t suffer as your company scales up.

You also need to be sure that your business systems, employees, and infrastructure can accommodate growth. For instance, if you get a sudden surge in orders, will your company be able to cope? Will you be still able to manufacture and deliver products or services on time? Do you have enough employees to deal with a surge in work or sales?

Scaling a business requires careful planning and some funding. To be successful, you’ll need to have the right systems, processes, technology, staff, finance, and even partners in place.

Identify process gaps

Audit your business processes (core processes, support processes, and management processes) to find their strengths and weaknesses. Find the process gaps and address them before you start to scale up.

Keep the processes simple and straightforward. Complex processes slow things down and hinder progress.

Boost sales

Decide what your company needs to do to increase sales. How many new customers will you need to meet your scaled-up goals?

Create a sales growth forecast that details the number of new clients you need, the orders, and the revenue you want to generate.

Examine your existing sales structure and decide if it can generate more sales. Can you increase your flow of leads? Do you need to offer different products or services? Is there an untapped market? Do you have a marketing system to track and manage leads? Is your sales team capable of following up and closing more leads?

Make sure you have enough staff to cope with an increase in sales. If you don’t have enough staff, consider hiring new employees, outsourcing tasks, or finding partners that may be able to handle functions more efficiently than your company.

Forecast costs

Once you’ve done the sales growth forecast, create an expense forecast that includes the new technology, employees, infrastructure and systems you’ll need to be able to handle the new sales orders. The more detailed your cost estimates, the more realistic your plan will be.

Get funding

If you need to hire more staff, install new technology, add facilities or equipment, and create new reporting systems, you’ll need funds. Consider how you will fund the company’s growth.

Make delighting customers a priority

To reach your sales forecasts, your company will need loyal customers. You’ll win their loyalty by delivering outstanding products or services and customer service every time you interact with them.

Invest in technology

Invest in technology that will automate tasks. Automation will bring costs down and make production more efficient.

Ensure that your systems are integrated and work smoothly together.

Ask for help

Don’t be afraid to ask for help from experts who have experience in scaling up companies. In an interview, Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, said, “I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me when I’ve asked them for help.

“I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the phone when I called – I just asked.

“Most people never pick up the phone and call; most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you’ve gotta be willing to fail; you gotta be ready to crash and burn, with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”

The use of management dashboards to monitor management KPIs, metrics and other essential data points will allow you and your management team to make rapid, data-based decisions based on up-to-date information about your business.

A management dashboard provides you with a comprehensive snapshot of the company’s performance. This is critical since it condenses massive amounts of information into a one-page summary that can provide invaluable insight into the health of your company and help with executive decision-making.

It allows you and your managers to access the most relevant information instantly.

The data is represented graphically using tables, line charts, bar charts, sparklines, maps, or gauges so you and other users can see the information at a glance.

They also allow you and other users to drill down to investigate further if necessary.

Types of business dashboards

There are three types of business dashboards:

• Operational dashboards which emphasise monitoring. These reflect the business processes and help monitor KPIs.
• Strategic dashboards which emphasise management. They reflect the end status of a KPI or metric for a set period.
• Tactical dashboards that highlight analysis. They will help you to identify trends and to track how metrics have changed.

Finance dashboard

Your finance dashboard should offer a summary and interpretation of key aspects such as profit and loss, and cash management.

Sales and Marketing dashboard

Your marketing dashboard should provide insight into how successful the company’s marketing efforts are at generating sales and attracting and retaining customers. You should be able to see where people are getting ‘stuck’ in your sales funnel or pipeline.

Risk management dashboard

Your operation and safety dashboard should help you and your team to manage and prevent risk. It could include training and awareness, incident management, claims, compliance, risks for assets and projects, and hazard identification.

HR dashboard

Your HR dashboard should provide reports on internal metrics such as employee satisfaction as well as external metrics such as your company’s success rates for recruitment. Depending on the size of the organisation, it could also be used to track turnover and retention rates.

The benefits of using management dashboards

• Instant access to core business metrics

Users across your organisation will be able to access core business metrics.

• Consolidate data from across multiple analytic services

The management dashboard consolidates data from many data points in an organisation to provide one reporting interface. It will save time and effort typically spent on compiling reports, signing into different analytic services and then sharing the data to everyone in the company.

• Provide real-time updates

Since changes in data or values is reflected in dashboards, you can identify fluctuations in crucial business metrics when they happen rather than having to wait for daily or weekly reports.

• Align departments

Dashboards can provide metrics that are relevant to each department.

• Allow root cause analysis

If you spot unusual trends in your summary reports, you can drill down to find their root cause.

• Communicate and manage strategy

Dashboards can be used as agents to boost organisational change.

How to design the best dashboard

A well-designed dashboard will help improve your company’s productivity and save time, but a badly-designed dashboard will confuse users and challenging to share. It needs to be easy to use and to report the most meaningful data and insights.

That’s why it’s critical that you select the right metrics to display. Avoid the temptation to add as many metrics as you can. If you need to monitor lots of metrics, use dashboard tabs.

Keep the design simple to make it easier for people to read and to digest the information. Avoid using too many colours or fonts or different graphics. Group data in a way that’s relevant and which provides context.

To encourage as broad a range of users as possible, make the dashboard interactive with options to filter and drill down.

Decide the reporting frequency based on the type of dashboard you’re using. For example, structure operational dashboards so they provide daily reports and set up strategic dashboards to give a monthly or quarterly report.

Before joining The CFO Centre India in 2014, Rajarshi Datta had accumulated 18 years of finance experience and has a proven track record as a Chief Financial Officer (including at Clear Channel in India). Raj, now CEO of The CFO Centre India, has helped numerous SMEs improve their finance function and fast track their growth. In his time at The CFO Centre, one issue has remained a constant for the entrepreneurs he has met, raising funding. So we asked Raj for his top tips on raising funding:

How can I raise Funding for my business?

Firstly, you need to create a business plan and understand the gaps which are currently in the business. Figure out whether you need additional funds or whether your existing business plan can support your operations. If you feel that your existing operations aren’t generating enough gas and isn’t at a sustainable level, then this is the time to raise funding.

Make a business plan, analyse your business and ask yourself, “Can I wait for equity funding?” If you aren’t able to wait for equity funding, which typically takes time, then look towards debt funding. It will take less time to raise debt funding, however you will need to pay interest, which is an additional burden on your business.

Why should I raise equity finance/equity funding?

In India, the previous generation of entrepreneurs were predominantly starting their businesses because they had the money. Now with modern day businesses, a lot of entrepreneurs are starting their journey with a simple business idea. Typically they are bootstrapped for some time and reach a stage where they can’t continue to grow with their own money. This is a critical junction for an entrepreneur, if they’re not able to raise funding from an outside source then the growth will be stunted.

In order to get that boost, you need to look to an outside source. This is raising funding through equity finance is needed, however equity finance can take time. You need to create a business plan and share a teaser with the different types of investors you pitch to, who will take their own time. This process can typically take 3-12 months.

Why should I raise debt funding/debt finance?

For an entrepreneur, waiting 3-12 months to raise funding through equity finance might not be a viable option. If you’re struggling with cash and need to raise capital quickly, you should look to debt funding. If the entrepreneur’s requirement is low, they won’t go for equity funding. From an investor’s point of view if the amount is too small, it’s not worth their time and money. It’s easier for a business owner to go for debt funding and get the money from the banks or another source.

What are things to consider as a small business or SME before applying for funding?

Consider whether you need to raise funding. A lot of businesses don’t create a proper cash flow analysis and assume that they need to raise funding. Once they make the analysis, they may see they don’t need funding at all. If you feel that there is a need, the first thing to consider is whether you will go for debt funding or equity funding. If it is debt funding, then monitor your revenue generated from your products or services and decide whether for the next few months/years (depending on if it’s short or long term funding) it is big enough to cover an EMI. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where your revenue isn’t enough to cover your own fixed costs, plus the bank interest and the principle which you need to pay.

Within your role have you come across any examples where raising funding has been crucial in helping a business go to the next level?

The clients we meet with will typically want to raise funding in some way. If we are working with a smaller company, at some stage when they are looking for further growth, they will need funding. This is a regular occurrence for us. CFO Centre India had an instance where a company, whose turnover was around 35 crores, were looking for debt funding. The owner was certain that they wanted to raise funding through unsecured loans. There was no security to be offered and they were not ready to give a personal guarantee, so we set about getting unsecured loans from various sources. In India there is a scheme the government introduced, through which we can get an unsecured loan of 2 crores, but it will not come from one financial institution.

We approached 25 to 30 NBFCs &  seasoned banks and raised an overall sum of around 6 crores, which was fully unsecured. Almost every client will need to raise funding through debt finance or equity finance at some stage, as most clients we work with are small companies looking at expanding.

What is the biggest tip that you can provide for a company looking to raise funding?

You need to be sure that you need the funding, you shouldn’t raise funding because other companies are. Once you are sure, you need to figure out whether you want debt funding or equity funding. If its equity funding, then make a solid business plan, which should clearly state the differentiation you’re making in the market. You need to be patient, and when there is a meeting with the investors you should present your story in a way that clearly shows you are passionate about your business.

Find out how we have sourced more than US$7bn in funding for our clients and how we can help you raise funding fast.

Register for your FREE Financial Health Check courtesy of The CFO Centre, or call us on +919967531075.