Please could you tell me how I can scale up my business? I've been trying for years and it's still just me.


I get asked this question a lot of the time, Toby, and it's a very good question.

The fact you're asking it suggests that you are already thinking about how to scale up your business, and in that regard you are on the right track.

Thinking about scaling up your business, the theory, is the first step on the road to doing the actual scaling up itself, the practice.




You'll be surprised when I say this but the key to scaling up a business is actually refreshingly simple and can be summed up in one word: growth.

If you grow your business, you will effectively be scaling it up.




Start by selling more of your service or product and then, vitally, taking on more employees.

If there are two of you, for example, and you hire two new staff, you will have scaled your business up by 100%. It's that simple.




Sometimes the key to scaling up a business is scaling it down, i.e. by automating as much of your business as possible.

So to return to our original example: if you are currently four staff and you lay off two staff, and replace their roles with a technology that does exactly what they were doing (minus the idle gassing at the water container and cigarette breaks!), you will have effectively scaled your business up, despite the fact that, on the surface, you have actually scaled it down!

I often joke that the business world works in funny ways and this is another example of exactly that.