OK, so you’ve got your company off the ground, you’ve got a few orders, a few repeat customers, the cash is trickling in, so how do you now scale that business upwards and turn that trickle into the torrent which will support your growth and future income?
Business owners have a huge range of intentions for their businesses, none of which should be criticised – if you are in the senior management of an organisation then it’s your business and it’s up to you what happens to it. I know of business owners who are happy to make one sale a week, then spend the rest of the week sitting on a river bank fishing. I know of others who are fighting tooth and nail for every order they can lay their hands on, and many who fit neatly in between.
So, if you want to make a £200 sale then take six days off to catch fish that’s fine, but you probably won’t be reading this blog, so I’ll leave you to your Carp, Perch or whatever your prey might be.
For the rest of us, getting a business off the ground is difficult, and how you scale it up seems to be a minefield, and in between the mines there are plenty of charlatans, ‘business advisers’* and scammers who assure you they will lead you to a pot of gold….
*I’m not saying all business advisors are up to no good by the way, I’ve met and used some who were excellent, but it is a “buyer beware” scenario.
Scaling Up
There are many stories of millionaires who started by making something in their garage or bedroom and then managed to turn it into a global empire. Is that just about having the cash to invest to make that happen? I’d argue no it isn’t, there are many people who’ve had access to finance and still failed.
There are many factors to success, but I’d say the first, and possibly unpopular thing, is discipline. To succeed turning a good idea into a great business requires the discipline to keep focussed, don’t let the small success go to your head, but look at what has made that success. What methods and processes did you follow? They may need to be nudged or modified, but some of the same processes that made a small organisation successful will probably work well in a larger organisation. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
So how does your business work, how do you find new opportunities, how do you turn those opportunities into orders, and how do you successfully deliver against those orders and make sure you have happy and satisfied customers who will order again?
A “Management System”?
This problem has been examined internationally, by renowned and successful business leaders from every continent. The result was a model for how the internal processes of a business should mesh together, forming a “Management System”. That management system is described in the International Standard ISO 9001, one of the most successful international standards to date.
ISO 9001, is known as a “Quality Management Standard”, this is in reference to it helping form a high-quality business, not JUST the type or condition of the products that business then sells.
Using ISO 9001 correctly will have a knock-on effect, helping give consistency to the product or service you are selling. This standard is applicable to your business whether you are aiming for high-end, prestige products & services with a large margin, or even if you are in a high volume but highly competitive and low margin environment.
ISO 9001 builds on the idea that, in order to be as successful as possible, a business should first look at the market that it wants to operate in, identify and analyse the risks of working in those markets, then ideally find ways to control or mitigate those risks as much as possible.
It then builds on this by encouraging you to define how the business operates; the processes and methods of how your business really works. Then measure how efficient those processes are, with a view to improving them little-by-little, to make the workings of the business as efficient as possible. This should help by taking the process of turning a potential customer into a happy, satisfied one; and then making this process reliable and consistent, which will then enable you to grow as a business and potentially improve your margins by streamlining processes and reducing rework/complaint costs.
Many large procurement organisations insist on their suppliers using ISO 9001, they believe having these systems in place results in a more reliable supplier. In many cases this is then taken further by asking the suppliers to become “certified” to ISO 9001. This involves an independent third-party assessment* of your company’s operating processes, documentation and evidence to show you conform to the standards requirements.
Many businesses find that ISO 9001 opens opportunities with many more customers, it also greatly simplifies the completion of bid and tender documentation: often providing a copy of your ISO 9001 certification will negate the need to answer pages of questions and supply additional evidence to prove your credibility to the prospective customer.
Get in touch
We’ve been working in quality management and the certification of businesses to ISO 9001 since around 1990, so have experience of many industries, many certification processes, and many standards. Certification doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but could increase your brand recognition and give you access to more customers. If you’d like to know more why not drop us a line.
No AI was used to write this post, so the spelling and grammatical errors are all mine, and the result of a UK, state provided, education 😊, for which I remain, most thankful.
*Within the UK, Europe and many places around the world, third-party assessment is viewed as being critical to proper certification. As such, government-controlled bodies have been developed to ensure that certification companies (the people doing the assessments and issuing certificates) are fair, meet a consistent standard and are suitably independent to minimise conflicts of interest.
For the UK, our body is known as UKAS (United Kingdom Accreditation Service), they make sure the people giving out the certificates are meeting expectations.
It’s easy to check if these companies are approved by UKAS through the online register here.