18th Mar, 2022
No matter what type of business you run, you’ll no doubt want to ensure that your business can continue to develop, both now and in the future. If you’re serious about long-term success, it’s time to start thinking about your scalability.
Will your business be able to handle more customers and more work, without sacrificing your quality of service or incurring significant new costs? If not, then your business could have some serious scalability issues. Many things can affect business scalability. But in an increasingly digital world, the technology your business uses can end up having a damaging impact on your ability to scale your business.
In this blog, we’ll be taking a look at how you can harness technology to drive sustainability and achieve the sustained growth your business is looking for.
What Is Scalability?
According to Investopedia, ‘Scalability is a characteristic of an organization, system, model, or function that describes its capability to cope and perform well under an increased or expanding workload or scope.’ In basic terms, scalability means your business has the staff, resources, and equipment to deal with more work and more customers.
Every business has to start somewhere. But to form a successful, long-term business, your initial period of growth needs to be followed by scaling. For that reason, it’s best to build scalability into your business from the start, especially when it comes to technology.
Growing Versus Scaling
Let’s talk about growth versus scalability. What’s the difference between growing and scaling? Because both involve increasing business size and revenue, the two terms are often used interchangeably. Whilst growing and scaling do have some similarities, it’s worth bearing in mind the key difference.
Business growth generally means increasing your customers, employees, offices, or business revenue. This can be achieved without scaling but won’t be sustainable: continued growth takes a lot of resources and often incurs new costs, meaning profit margins largely stay the same or only increase marginally.
Scalability on the other hand focuses on growing your revenue and increasing your profit margins by increasing efficiency. It’s a more sustainable approach that allows you to expand your customer base and continue offering the same quality service, whilst also seeing your effort pay off in gross profit.
Tips to Develop a Scalable Business
So, you’ve successfully managed to grow your business. Now you want to ensure that this growth is sustainable and that you start to see an increased profit. You need to start thinking about scalability. But where do you start? Developing a truly scalable business is no easy feat. Here are some things you could consider helping achieve the scalability you’re looking for.
Create Efficient Processes
If you’re looking to increase business capacity, creating efficient processes can help to increase productivity across your business, as well as deliver cost savings. By examining your processes for inefficiencies and disjointed workflows, you can identify areas for improvement and ensure your operations are fit to handle an increased customer base.
Embrace Automation
Automation can help you increase your capacity and serve more customers, without necessarily having to increase your staff levels. By automating repetitive admin tasks, you allow your workforce to focus on higher-value tasks. This can help you achieve one of the main objectives of scalability: increasing your revenue without incurring substantial additional costs.
Deploy Scalable Technology
Technology can either support or hamper your scalability efforts. Your technology needs to be able to handle taking on more customers and more work, without increasing your operational cost too much. To build a scalable business you need scalable technology. Think SaaS and Cloud-based solutions, rather than relying on expensive hardware.
Hire the Right Talent
Depending on what type of business you run, you may need to hire more staff in order to scale up and expand your business capacity. If this applies to your business, it’s important to hire talent that’s right for the job. This will ensure that your business has the skills and experience it needs to successfully meet the demand of your customers.
Embrace Digital Over Paper
Paper-based processes are incompatible with the goals of scaling your business. Processing physical paperwork is time consuming, costly, and ultimately limiting; there will only be a certain amount of business you can take on before you reach your maximum capacity. Keeping your documents digital allows you to process more paperwork with less effort and in less time.
Benefits of Scalability
With the effort, strategy, and investment it can take to transition your business from the growth to the scalability phase, you may be wondering if it’s truly worth it for your business. Let’s explore some of the benefits that achieving scalability can bring to your business.
Grow and Maintain your Business
Whilst growth is always good for a business, scalability is the thing that helps you maintain and improve upon your growth. Growing your business means you build up your employees, processes, and customers. Turning the focus toward scaling rather than growing can improve operational efficiency and help ensure you can sustain a high level of business.
Remain Adaptable to Market Changes
No matter what kind of business you run, being able to adapt to any changes in your sector or market is an absolute must. There may be times when your business needs to scale up or down to meet the demands of the market. Having scalable business processes and technology help to build adaptability into your business.
Provide a Quality Customer Experience
When you focus solely on growth, you run the risk of being unprepared to deal with your increasing customer base. This could lead to a sacrifice in the quality of your product or service, which could harm your business reputation. Building scalability into your business ensures you offer a consistent and impressive customers experience.
More Cost-Effective Operations
A big part of scalability is increasing your profits without incurring substantial costs. Focusing on scalability can therefore help you create more cost-effective processes and help you increase your bottom-line. In certain industries, economies of scale can occur. This is when your average costs start decreasing as your output increases.
Offer Flexible and Hybrid Working
As most scalable technology embraces cloud computing, implementing scalable technology also brings the added bonus of built-in flexibility. With your business applications, desktop and phone system stored in the Cloud, you can offer flexible and hybrid working options to your employees and ensure they can continue working from anywhere.
Tech That Helps Build a Scalable Business With Technology
Technology is essential to the scalability of your business. Your technology needs to be able to keep up with the demands of your business. If not, it could seriously impede your attempts to scale, as well as your efficiency, productivity and customer experience.
If you’re looking for tech that can help build scalability into your business, here are five things you should consider implementing:
SaaS
Remember the days when you had to install software from a disk? SaaS or Software as a service makes this a thing of the past, allowing users to connect and use business applications over the Internet.
Saas is easy to implement and allows employees to log on from anywhere. It can be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis and will often accommodate a certain number of users. This helps to make your business applications a lot more scalable, allowing you to easily add or remove users as your business requires.
CRM Software
More customers mean more information and interaction to manage. It’s vital your business continues to keep track and organise its customer data. If not, you could see your customer experience start to decline and your repeat customers dwindle.
Ensuring you implement a quality CRM software will help you centralise your customer information and interactions in one place. Say goodbye to inefficient paper records or spreadsheets and ensure your business is prepared to scale up, without sacrificing customer service.
E-Signature Platform
For many businesses, collecting signatures on documents and contracts is vital to their daily business operations. Yet paper-based processes are difficult to scale up; you need to switch to digital documents. Adopting an electronic signature can help end your dependency on paper documents and increase efficiency without substantially increasing cost.
With digital documents on the case, your business will be prepared to deal with more documents and more customers, ensuring you continue to offer a responsive and efficient service to all your clients.
Hosted Phone System
Opting for a hosted phone system will equip your business with a scalable communication system. A hosted phone system eliminates the need for expensive on-site equipment and allows you to easily set up new users without having to buy more hardware. This ensures that you can expand your phone system in the future if you need to.
For added flexibility, most hosted phone systems will also have some sort of softphone functionality, allowing you to take work calls over a smartphone or desktop.
Connectors and APIs
Adding automation to your processes is a great way to increase operational efficiency without incurring high costs. With automation taking care of basic admin, you can deploy your employees across other areas of your business and maximise your workforce.
With connectors and APIs, your business can create automated workloads that really benefit your business. APIs will require a more experienced developer, whilst connectors offer a more simplified ‘wrapper’ to add automation to your processes.
Why Choose E-Sign?
If you’re looking for a scalable and customisable e-signature, E-Sign should be at the top of your list. We understand that you have a range of E-Signature providers to choose from. Here’s why we think you should opt for E-Sign as your number 1 choice supplier:
Developer Hub for API Integration
Make sure all your business applications can communicate and work together with our API integration. Our Developer Hub provides a custom-built area for developers and coders, making it easier for businesses to create their own highly personalised digital ecosystems, complete with integrations and automation.
Connectors for Easy Automation
Here at E-Sign, we believe that basic automation should be available to every business, no matter your size or digital maturity. Our range of E-Sign connectors is compatible with some of the most popular business applications out there. Using Zapier and Microsoft Power Automate, you can add easy automation with pre-set triggers and actions.
Unlimited Signatures and Envelopes
All our business packages come with unlimited e-signatures and envelopes. Whether you only sign a few documents a week or a pile of documents a day, your e-signature can keep up with the demands of your business. For one monthly or yearly payment, you’ll always have the capacity you need to e-sign and send all the documents you need.
Multiple Users and Unlimited Users
With our Business and Business Pro packages, you can add multiple users to the E-Sign software. With Enterprise, you get unlimited! With such flexibility built into the platform, you can easily add employees to your e-signature platform as your business grows. Perfect for scaling up and down your business.
Are You Looking for an E-signature to Support Your Business Scalability?
If you’re looking for a user-friendly and flexible e-signature, check out E-Sign today. Create efficient processes across your business with digital documents, our built-in ID Checker and an integrated payment gateway.
Want to try out E-Sign for free? Our 14-day free trial is just the thing for you. We don’t ask for your payment information, so you can try out our platform and e-signature with no strings attached.
E-Sign is a leading provider of digital transaction management solutions, supplying professional services including Electronic Signatures, Web Forms, ID Checker, Verification Tools, Personalised Emails, API and Payment Processing to businesses of all sizes across the UK.
To find out more about our E-Sign solutions and how they could transform your business, get in touch with us today.
