May 29, 2021 7 min read
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In today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, there are dozens — if not hundreds — of digital tools and platforms at your disposal to start growing your business and gain traction from the comfort of your own home.
One common misconception many budding entrepreneurs have is that scaling their business to seven figures requires encompassing a multitude of fancy tricks or expensive methods. However, this is far from the truth. The following seven strategies can help budding entrepreneurs understand the keys to their own future success.
1. Start with a service
The best way to reach seven figures from your new home business is to offer a service, rather than a product. Products require more upfront overhead due to the costs of manufacturing, distributing and shipping inventory. While services require human capital, the work can usually be done with a laptop and wifi connection from anywhere in the world. In order to narrow in on which service you want your business to sell, start by researching which services are consistently in high demand and have the potential to provide higher long-term profits and ROIs.
Related: These Young Entrepreneurs Saw Covid Coming and Changed the Way They Serve Their Customers
2. Automate your outbound marketing
After you’ve settled on which service you want to sell, the next step is to begin automating your outbound marketing and customer engagements. This can include automating any aspect of your business’s outbound marketing such as paid advertisements, emails, cold calls and more. But whatever you choose to automate, it must be scalable.
Begin by scaling your email, LinkedIn, and Instagram marketing and outreach in order to connect with potential clients and customers. This method is similar to “flyering,” but without the bulk of hands-on work that would be required of human employees. Then, group all inbound messages you receive from this automated outbound reach into a designated email inbox that allows you to respond to those messages. You will soon see hundreds of messages coming in each day based on the service you offer.
Related: 8 Lessons in Using Linkedin for Marketing
3. Be able to sell your service
In order to sell the service your business provides, you need to make sure that you become an all-around master in the service itself. This will require you to understand every aspect of what the service entails and price your service competitively for how you market it to the customers or clients you want to primarily serve.
For example, your service can scale from $500/month to $5,000/month after you’ve established yourself as a master in the service you provide to customers. If you aren’t sure how to best price out your business’s service, remember that you always need to start pricing to coincide with your own level of expertise. This will let you offer virtually any kind of service you want, so long as you match your price with your expertise. Once you start making sales at that initial price, then you need to start on the next step in the process.
4. Outsource
This step in the process is when you need to begin scouting for contractors to perform the hands-on work for your business. After you do the hands-on work yourself a handful of times, you should have enough knowledge and expertise in both the subject matter and the process to train others to do it for you.
Once you have outsourced a working contractor, you should have a solid method of your sales process, including what it fully entails as far as daily, weekly and monthly tasks and OKRs. The trick here then becomes scaling that one contractor to several in order to handle more work as your business begins growing.
5. Use the contractor model to scale your company’s growth
After you have tested out your entire sales process with a handful of contractors, the next step is scaling that process up to match your business’s growth. This can include contracting someone to manage your cold email outreach for you or hiring someone to eventually take over the entire sales process for your business.
If you aren’t sure where or how to start scaling your contractors, you can easily find a multitude of suitable experts on freelancer sites or other platforms where you can find contractors, or even potential clients, depending on the specific service and niche market your business serves.
Once this is complete, the next step towards scaling your business into one that generates seven figures annually is to create a sustainable infrastructure for your company’s internal operations.
6. Build structure into your business
By the time you reach this step, your business should be employing a larger team. But as your business grows both through its human capital and its customer database, so too does your responsibility in ensuring your employees follow your business’s proven process. This will require you to create a foundation of structure within your business for your employees to follow.
Begin by building in training courses, modules and documentation for your team to lean on. Utilizing project management software and a CRM software to handle client engagements will help you scale your business and grow a more robust service offering to your customers. Eventually, you will become so familiar with your business’s processes that you will become an expert of your own people, allowing you to identify who on your team is adhering to the process by following certain checkpoints in the process.
From there, you can take the best material your team has generated and use them as case studies to further build out and refine your service pitch. By this point, you may have 10 or more contractors who — like you — are experts in the process. Use their abilities and knowledge to help train others who may be underperforming and bring them up to your level, before heading on to the final step.
7. Hire full-time employees
This is the last step in scaling your business into one that generates seven figures (or more) in annual revenue. Once your contractors are just as knowledgeable as you in your company’s internal processes and your business has created several examples of best-in-class material documents and case studies, lean on their experience within your company in order to help get your new full-time hires trained.
When scaling your business, some other important factors to consider include:
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Constant communication: Don’t be afraid to schedule weekly or bi-weekly Zoom meetings with your team and key clients. Be transparent, honest and upfront with them as much as possible to continue building trust internally and externally for your business.
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Continued training exercises and modules: Even the most renowned subject matter experts falter from time to time. In being consistent with training, employees can not only become better at their job, but they also become more attached to your company and its brand.
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Networking and events: Never underestimate the power of a positive referral. Networking and attending events for your industry — virtual or otherwise — is vital in creating brand awareness and identity from other experts in your field who may not be familiar with your business.
Scaling any business from zero to seven figures is complicated, but it’s more than possible. While every business and brand is different, there are always going to be other important factors to consider in regards to how you want your business to perform and succeed. Use the strategies listed here, and you will be able to better navigate a complicated process. Best of all, you will build a strong brand from the ground up.
Related: When to Take Your Freelance Business Full-Time
