SMBs and Scalability: Is it Doable?
Scaling can be a trojan horse for SMBs with subscriptions or memberships: it looks appealing on the outside, but soon brings serious problems. SMBs often lack the infrastructure, time, and resources they need to keep up with any expansion in the base. This article talks through the most common scalability challenges and the best practices that help overcome them. It finishes with a solution that uses automation to make scalability not only possible, but efficient.
In this article:
- Scalability for SMBs
- Scaling SMBs: What Are the Challenges?
- Scalability Best Practices
- How One Solution Will Do It For You
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central + Bluefort Are Here to Help
- The Final Hurdle: Money
The problem of scaling is the greatest irony of SMBs.
In every scenario, growth should be good. In fact, it should be crucial. But for many SMBs, growth puts them in an awkward position because it stretches their resources and infrastructure even more.
Growth might even backfire on an SMB.
All the challenges that come with scaling might feel impossible, but they aren’t insurmountable. Though there are constraints to scaling, there are also best practices that can help.
There is also one solution that can take care of everything for your business.
Scalability for SMBs
There’s not much point in having an SMB that doesn’t grow. Scalability is critical for sustainability.
But if you want to scale your business successfully, you need to be able to expand your operations enough to accommodate it, but not too much to sacrifice how your business performs.
But expanding operations can require more people, more hours, more effort.
What complicates things further is that many SMBs who are desperate to be able to scale assume that they’re priced out of solutions that will enable them to grow. Or that making the change is so expensive that their financial situation will be worse.
So what are the logistical problems that hold SMBs back?
Scaling SMBs: What Are the Challenges?
We work with SMBs, and we’ve heard the struggles.
Here are the ones we see most often:
1. Not enough people: Chances are you and your team or teams are already stretched as it is. They might be tasked with different types of jobs, spinning a lot of plates, and at risk of burnout as it is.
The idea of doing more, longer hours, more tasks to get right simply might not be tenable.
2. Not enough money: You know how tight money can get- especially with how unstable economies have been over the last few years. When your budget is already stretched to the limit, it might feel impossible to stretch it even further for more staff, newer tech, more supplies, or a bigger operations setup.
If this is your situation, you’re forced with a choice. Do you discourage scaling so that you can keep up, which risks alienating potential customers for good? Or do you accept operating while overstretched, which risks alienating your workers and current customers? 3. Not enough infrastructure and tech: There are so many ways that infrastructure can be inadequate for your needs. Maybe you’re operating on a manual or otherwise outdated system, which leaves you experiencing delays, revenue leakage, and churn.
You could also be suffering with other infrastructure problems, like suppliers. You might be treading water with unreliable suppliers, but you can’t sort it out because you aren’t able to invest in more reliable suppliers.
Whatever the problems with infrastructure and tech, the idea of more customers feels like that could push your business over the brink.
4. Not enough operational efficiency: This is a constant problem for SMBs. Most suffer from the curse of manual processes, and processes and workflows that are disconnected, and quite frankly, liabilities.
But without the resources, what are they supposed to do?
What should SMBs that want to scale and help secure the future of the business do to make growth doable?
Scalability Best Practices
Knowing the challenges of growth, what can be done to turn things around?
Here of some of the best practices SMBs can adopt to put their business on the path:
- Strategic planning: You can’t scale without a solid plan. The plan needs to include your targets for growth and how you plan to get there, the obstacles you may face, how to overcome them, and contingency plans for emergencies and unexpected events.
- Use social media: Social media platforms can give an SMB a real advantage, if they’re used correctly. They do take some time to get the hang of, and time will need to be invested in the creation of content with the right messaging that will engage and grow the customer base. A social media planner like Hootsuite or SocialPilot will help take some of the pressure off and keep things organized.
- Partnerships: We know the power of partnerships. SMBs shouldn’t have to go it alone. There are natural partnerships and collaborations that businesses can make to grow into new markets and bases. It’s just about getting creative. For example, a gourmet popcorn SMB could partner with a drinks company or a celeb gossip website because they go naturally.
- Optimizing operations: Scalability will demand the most efficient operations possible. Processes and workflows should be cleared of bottlenecks, resources and time waste. Inefficiency will only increase with scaling.
- Personalized marketing: Marketing campaigns that bring in growth must be impactful and target the audiences the SMB wants as customers. That means using data to get a clear understanding of existing and potential customers so that marketing, messaging, and offerings can be segmented and personalized. This is what drives engagement and conversions.
- Easy accounting: No matter what the size of your SMB, accounting is a massive consumer of your time and resources. But it doesn’t have to be. Automated financial management can take care of everything for you, including invoicing, billing, payment collection, reconciliation, and reports. That avoids expensive mistakes, and lack of compliance.
Some of these best practices might be appealing to you, but the idea of purchasing different solutions to scale might feel like the last thing you want to do.
How are you supposed to find the time to put these best practices into the action that will finally help you scale?
How One Solution Will Do It For You
Many SMBs who try to scale buy one solution after the next, in a piecemeal way, which actually burdens them even more.
However, there’s a simple solution to this problem. And that solution is a unified software platform that automates everything for you.
Cloud computing, automation, and a good ERP will make everything more efficient, and it frees up your time so that you can focus on the strategy and partnerships that will push your growth even more.
Automation can do so much for your SMB.
First off, it streamlines your operations by taking care of most of the manual, repetitive tasks that rob so much of your time. Everything from invoicing, billing, and recognized revenue to sales opportunities, to financial record-keeping, and compliance will be taken care of.
That cuts back on time consumption, errors, and expensive problems that are created when you fall out of compliance. On top of that, there aren’t any silos- information flows in real time between your financial, sales and customer service teams. That’s less revenue leakage, invoice and contract term mistakes, and fines.
And because the right platform will recognize revenue for you, you’ll also get numbers that you can rely on at all times. And the system will create financial reports for you.
Just imagine how much time and pain you’ll be spared with these actions.
But there’s more.
Automation creates the circumstances needed to give your customers an excellent personalized experience. The platform consolidates your customer information, and automation crunches untapped customer data, and segments your customers (as well as creating a singular personalized experience for each customer).
Automation can track customer behavior, needs, and preferences so that you offer tailored packages and products that will appeal to them. It also allows you to create personalized communication and equips you with the information you need for targeted marketing.
Given that strategy is so important for scaling, you’ll be able to utilize data-driven insights for the best decision-making. You get analysis and valuable insights to inform your choices in the short and long-term based on real-time trends.
Everything from pricing to developing new products and offerings will have hard data to back them up. The guesswork is eliminated.
Automation makes all these processes inherently scalable. There is no additional burden because no matter how much you grow, the right solution grows with you.
Your processes will handle the increased demand, with no proportional drain on your resources. Growth is no longer a logistical concern.
But there’s a challenge – with so many software options available, how can your SMB choose the platform that’s right for your situation and needs?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central + Bluefort Are Here to Help
Business Central is the perfect ERP system for SMBs. It’s flexible and it grows with you.
And Bluefort are the recurring revenue experts. We can implement Business Central for you with all the customization you need to get the most out of it.
We’re here to help you:
- free your time and resources
- cut costs and churn
- build your customer base
- bring in more revenue
- expand your business
- make your life a lot easier.
No doubt this all sounds amazing. Who doesn’t want more time and growth, unrestricted by infrastructure? You might be thinking, “Where do I sign up?”
But like many SMBs, you might be worried about cost.
When your money is currently stretched to the limit, it’s important to see the value of something first, so that you can confidently invest in it.
The Final Hurdle – Money
A cloud-based ERP and accounting system gives so much value that your SMB cannot afford to function without it.
Here’s how:
1. Cost/resource savings over time in these areas:
- IT and maintenance of outdated legacy systems
- Automation of routine tasks
- Elimination of mistakes and delays in the invoicing, billing, and payment collection process
- Integration of systems so there’s nothing lost or opportunities missed
- No guesswork in customer interaction, product development, etc.
- Complete revenue recognition, so you get no leakage
2. No big up-front cost: Most SMBs believe that they must fork out tens or hundreds of thousands in an upfront investment. But that’s not how this combination works. It’s on a subscription, so you spread the payments over time.
3. Finding and giving new value you don’t currently have:
- The metrics from your data will identify opportunities for growth that you wouldn’t currently have access to.
- You can feel confident that your business will remain secure and compliant.
- You’ll get better collaboration between your teams because they all have the information and the time that they need.
4. The competitive advantage: You will automatically have a one-up on your competitors who do not have an integrated ERP with subscription management and recognized revenue. It’s that simple. You’ll be more efficient, and you’ll know how to capture their customers with the customer data insights at your fingertips.
When an SMB makes that investment of the first months’ subscription payment, they get to enjoy benefits immediately.
Because the chances are, it’s the inefficient processes that have stretched your budget in the first place. So, getting rid of inefficiency will free up your time and resources.
And all of this is just a few clicks away.
Conclusion
It’s clear that if an SMB wants to be successful, it needs to scale.
But it also needs to the circumstances that help build that growth, because growth comes with serious challenges. Challenges like limited money, very little spare time, legacy technology, and resource limitations.
These challenges must be overcome, or an SMB will be at a distinct disadvantage that will hinder long-term growth.
The good news is that when an SMB actions best practices that enable scaling, they can turn things around. Those best practices do require some time and resources, unless the SMB gets a solution that automates nearly all the processes for them.
Scalable solutions like Business Central + Bluefort help SMBs overcome scaling problems because it is a platform that’s integrated and grows with the business.
The platform’s ability to support process efficiency, better customer experience, streamlined accounting and revenue recognition clear the decks so that SMBs can focus on the high-value strategic work that can make growth explosive.
But without any of the baggage that growth brings the unprepared.
And that’s value that no one can put a price on.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and enjoy scaling, let Microsft Dynamics 365 Business Central + Bluefort help you. Book a free Discovery Call with our team today.
Let’s chat further.
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