The five secrets to scaling up.

As a senior leader in a business that has scaled from start-up to become the USA’s fastest growing print business in just seven years, I’m often asked ‘what’s the secret to scaling up successfully?’

It’s a simple question, but it is not a simple topic. Scaling up is not like cooking the perfect poached egg or training for a marathon; there is no works-every-time, tried-and-tested answer that you can write down in a handful of bullet points. Scaling relies on understanding your market and your business, and using that knowledge to set goals and work as a team to achieve them.

There is no silver bullet, but there are a few non-negotiables, so this is not a blueprint or a how-to; it’s call to action. If you want to scale, you need to be match fit and focused – here are my top five tips.

1. Plan meticulously, not rigidly

If you want to scale your business, you need to set goals and plan how you’re going to achieve them. But it’s important to remember when you make your plan that one thing is certain – not everything will go to plan.

A big success factor when you’re scaling up is having the ability to recognise when things aren’t going to plan, along with the agility and resilience to adjust decisively and in good time. Planning for how you’ll scale your business before you embark on managed growth is essential, but just as essential is constantly reviewing and updating your plans to make sure they are still right for your business and your market. Change is inevitable, and even in the throws of scaling, you have to be ready for whatever comes your way.

Roll your sleeves up

A leader can’t scale a business alone – it takes a team. It’s also important to understand that, as a leader, you are part of that team and this is a hands-on job. To scale effectively, and take the team with you, you’ll need to be prepared to get your hands dirty, put the hours in, and lead by example. There are no ivory towers in successful scaling, just plenty of hard work!

Live your vision and values

You probably had a clear vision when you started your business. It may have changed as you’ve grown, but as you scale, it will be more important than ever. Your vision and values are not only integral to your plans to scale the business, they are what will enable you to engage and inspire your team to go on that journey with you. Scaling your business will require hard work and commitment from everyone, and if you want others to put their heart and soul into building on your company’s success, you have to make sure they have a reason to invest their dedication and hard work. Scaling a business has the potential to create career opportunity, job security and financial rewards for the team, so ensuring those benefits are clearly communicated and carried through is vital.

Invest in talent

In addition to inspiring your team to share your passion for scaling up and what you’re building together, you also need to make sure you have the skills and knowledge you need on the team. Recruitment is critical, but it’s equally important to invest in developing the people you need, rather than chasing unicorn talent that doesn’t exist. At Catapult, we focus our recruitment on finding people with the right aptitudes and cultural fit, rather than searching for plug-and-play professionals to fit he roles we need to fill, because skills can be taught, but the right passion and attitude is much harder to nurture.

We also work hard at the recruitment piece – we’re interviewing all the time, even when we don’t have an immediate need. Why? because we never want to settle for average when we urgently need to grow the team, we want to ensure that we always have a bank of great candidates to call back when the right role comes up.

Leverage the power of tech

As I’ve already explained, I think people are central to scaling up, but, tech is equally and increasingly important too. For Catapult, some of that has meant investing in the latest presses, coaters and platemaking machinery, but it’s not only companies with factory floor operations that need to keep pace with tech – or, ideally, stay a step ahead of it!

Part of our investment in tech as we’ve scaled has been in systems and processes, such as our Crystal management and data analytics system and our Crystal+ app. If you want to scale effectively, having data at your fingertips that enables you to assess how you’re doing and spot any areas for improvement is critical. Which brings me neatly back to tip one: adapting in real time is a process facilitated by being able to interrogate the data that reveals every aspect of your business’s performance.

Are you ready to scale?

At Catapult, we went from start-up to scale-up in a relatively short amount of time, but we knew that we were ready to take that step without losing any of the uniqueness or customer service at the heart of our success. Before you start your scale up journey, my final piece of advice would be to ask yourself the same question – are you ready?