I am looking to scale up my business. What is your process when advising business owners?

That’s the question I received recently from a LinkedIn post when explaining the difference between scaling vs growth for a small business.

One of the things that I think is important to address in my response to this business owner is that I’m a small business marketing consultant, not a business consultant so the aspects of scaling a business will revolve around marketing participating in that objective, not necessarily being the sole driver.

Here’s my response:

Our process usually revolves around the marketing part.

For example, a lot of clients need to attract talent or partners in order to scale, and to help with achieving that business objective we:

• develop effective career pages
• develop effective partner recruiting pages
• incorporate online job applications
• incorporate online partner applications
• create employment ladder visuals
• interview your best partners to learn how to attract more
• interview your staff to learn how to attract more
• examine marketing, sales, and serving processes for improvements
• advise on resources to handle servicing components like phone answering, etc.

Having a process that you can repeat and get better at is one of the secrets to scaling your marketing or any aspect of your business for that fact.