It’s a dream for small businesses to suddenly blow up and get an influx of leads that takes it to the next level or beyond. But the truth is that most small businesses are simply not prepared for that kind of success.
Small Businesses Not Prepared for a Boom
That’s why it is important to devise a ‘Scale Map’ which will prepare your business for success. To help, business-scaling experts ScaleTime have teamed up with infographic design agency NowSourcing to explain how to prepare your business for the unexpected and create a ‘lean, profitable machine’.
They also gathered some interesting data on the current state of small businesses, so let’s look at their findings.
Small Business in the United States
Small businesses are a valuable contributor to economies all over the world, with forecasts predicting they could add $2.3 trillion to global GDP growth by 2024. This is despite the fact so many businesses are still recovering from the pandemic.
In 2021, the global closure rate for SMBs dropped from 24% to 18%, with the closure rate in the United States alone falling to 16%. These figures follow the huge increase in online microbusiness that occurred between 2019 and 2020 when Americans created 2.8 million such businesses.
With so many small business owners, it is unfortunate that most are unprepared for unexpected success. ScaleTime discovered over half of the small business owners were afraid to leave their businesses to go on vacation, while 79% are not prepared to get even just 10 new clients in a single week.
Creating a Scale Map
ScaleTime devised its Scale Map to help small businesses create a complete and optimized business system that can be easily delegated.
The first step is creating repeatable steps to track progress, followed by streamlining processes to run more efficiently. Then you must support assets so you don’t have to start from scratch every time. Then it is all about enabling workers to perform each process and keep improving, while constantly measuring the efficacy of the process.
Finally, the performance of each step in the map must be tracked to identify strengths and gaps.
Image: Envato Elements, scaletime
This article, "Small Businesses Not Prepared for a Boom" was first published on Small Business Trends
via https://www.aiupnow.com
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead, Khareem Sudlow
