Scaling your business: Best practices to automate, delegate, eliminate

Your business is growing fast. You’re hiring new people, expanding operations, and maybe even opening new offices. But growth also brings new challenges, and at some point, every business needs to focus on scaling.

Scaling means increasing efficiency and supporting growth without allowing costs and complexity to spiral out of control. To achieve this, businesses often need to reassess their products, services, infrastructure, and internal processes. Some activities can be delegated, others automated or streamlined, and some may no longer provide enough value to justify the time and resources they consume.

Plan before scaling your operations

Before deciding what to eliminate, delegate, or automate, you first need to understand how your business currently operates. Start by evaluating your workflows, analytics, team performance, and operational costs to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas that may become more problematic as your business grows.

For example, you may discover that certain tasks consume too much time and effort without delivering proportional value. One effective way to assess operational efficiency is by tracking how time is spent across projects and activities. With a time tracking tool like Lucen Track, you can monitor project hours, daily workloads, and billable time to better understand where resources are being used and where improvements can be made.

Source: timeneye.com

After evaluating your processes based on time, resource demands, and results, you should have a clearer understanding of where improvements can be made to increase efficiency and reduce costs. The next step is to evaluate your team and organizational structure. If your company is expected to grow quickly, you need to ensure the right people are in the right roles and identify any positions that may need to be added to support future growth.

For example, your current team may be able to efficiently support 100 customers, but scaling to 500 customers could require additional staff, new responsibilities, or better workflows. Take the time to analyze your operations carefully and brainstorm ways to improve efficiency, collaboration, and long-term scalability.

1. Processes to automate: Lead generation and customer support

Process automation is the best way to achieve better efficiency. Most of the time, growing businesses automate marketing processes and customer service.

I suggest you do the same.

Lead generation, a big part of marketing, and customer support, bring new customers in and keep them with you.

Here’s why let’s start with them.

Lead generation automation

First, lead generation.

Using software to automate some aspects of lead generation gives you the ability to get more leads without a tremendous time investment.

Lead magnets are a common lead generation automation method. They are free resources shared for the purpose of getting contact details from leads.

They are:

• free trial subscriptions;
• free consultations;
• white papers;
• blog content;
• reports;
• videos;
• other content that has value to potential customers.

Sharing the lead magnets automatically allows getting more contact details from potential customers 24/7.

The best part is that you can focus on lead nurturing while the lead magnets do their thing.

You can share your lead magnets via a pop-up window, a website banner, a free chatbot, or in your blog’s articles.

For example, here’s a blog chatbot offering a lead magnet to visitors.

If the visitor clicks “Yes,” the chatbot asks them to provide their emails to send the lead magnet to. This way, you can generate quality leads while focusing on other things.

The chatbot is completely non-obstructive and can collect emails from leads without having you involved.

But where on your website should you have chatbots, and, for that matter, lead magnets?

The answer is the pages with the highest traffic.

Use Google Analytics tools to see the most popular pages on your website to know where to focus your effort.

Customer support automation

As your customer base continues to grow, customer support requests will grow as well.

As support requests increase, your customer service team will need effective workflows and communication practices to stay productive without becoming overwhelmed. However, even that might not be enough. The sheer number of queries can quickly become difficult to manage.

With customer experience becoming a major brand differentiator, making customers wait for answers can quickly lead to frustration and lost business.

To keep the customer experience positive and respond to as many queries as possible, businesses should consider automating part of their support process.

Live chat and knowledge bases are two great ways to automate customer support.

Here’s why:

• they allow to get help anytime;
• they provide self-service options (67 percent of customers prefer them than speaking to a support agent).

So, live chat allows creating automatic messages with answers to the most common and repetitive questions from customers.

Typically, these questions take up a major share of all queries, so you can significantly reduce the workload for your team.

Here’s how Bicycleglass.com uses automatic live chat messages to help customers get support quickly.

Clicking on “Frequently Asked Questions” reveals service-related categories that customers often ask to help with.

Next, having a knowledge base is another great way to resolve a lot of queries.

It’s an organized collection of support-related articles offering answers to both common and more complex queries.

Lucen Track, for example, has a collection of detailed guides and tutorials for customers to get immediate answers to product-related queries (plus a search option).

The categories are neatly organized to resemble the most common customer goals.

This makes the search for product-related questions easier for customers while also reducing the workload for the support team.

2. Processes to delegate: Content writing and digital marketing

During your audit, you’ll find that some important processes can’t be automated.

Like content creation.

You can hire freelancers for processes like content writing. They can take care of your content needs on a project basis.

Hiring independent contractors is becoming a common way to find the top talent. In fact, 70 percent of small businesses have done that.

To monitor working time and manage the work of freelancers, you need to have a time tracking tool like Lucen Track.

In a single dashboard, you can access:

• project progress and deadlines;
• time of completion by project and task;
• who is assigned to complete a task or a project;
• how much money is spent on projects;
• assign roles and responsibilities to freelancers.

Here’s a view of the Lucen Track dashboard showing a calendar with ongoing projects.

Source: timeneye.com

Not only does Lucen Track help with monitoring the performance of freelancers, but it also generates useful project reports for managers.

A typical report includes such indicators as budget spending, billable time, total time spent implementing the project, and time a specific freelancer spent on which tasks.

Other common digital marketing areas both B2C and B2B companies tend to delegate are:

• website blog management. Includes content publication at predefined times
• guest blogging. This marketing approach helps with building reputation and getting backlinks needed to get higher in search engine results
• social media management. A freelancer can organize social media contests, publish your content, and engage with followers.

So, consider using them if you’re sure that your business needs external help to continue growing.

3. Processes to eliminate: Unnecessary processes, steps, and roles

For your business to grow quickly and efficiently, some processes/process steps/roles might need to be eliminated.

They can inhibit the growth of your business by:

• taking up too much time or resources;
• generating low ROI while requiring a lot of commitment;
• slowing down a process or undermining its performance.

In the long term, these processes can turn into a serious budget problem.

Here’s an example of a process that can require too much money in the long term.

A successful startup is using third-party services to do accounting, accepting payments, make video calls, and developing websites.

As the company continues its rapid growth, the management realizes they had underestimated potential expenditures on third-party services.

Just to show you how serious this could get, Uber paid Google for mapping services $58 million in three years. That equals about $53,000 per day.

That’s why try your best to estimate the payments to third-party service providers based on different projections about your customer base and financial performance.

Another important thing is to find processes and projects that need too much time and resources but generate low returns.

They might affect your business in the long run by having you focused on the wrong things.

Once again, you can use Lucen Track to track the completion times of projects and find out what takes a lot of time and eats your budget.

One way you can assess process performance more efficiently is with weekly project recap email reports. In Lucen Track, you can set up specific performance-related indicators to be sent to you as a weekly summary.

Having these emails after project completion might be a great help with evaluating its weak points as well as the value to your business.

Putting it all together

No path to growth is smooth all the way.

To keep up with your success and increase customer loyalty with top-notch service, you need to scale your business by evaluating all processes, projects, and roles.

Do it right and you’ll be able to handle a major increase in customer support queries, sales, marketing projects in a very cost-effective and efficient way.