In the early days of starting a business, scaling is probably the furthest thing from your mind, and that’s okay. Establishing your name, brand, and getting clients are exactly where your energy should be focused.

But after you start to gain a consistent income and your client roster begins to grow organically, it could be time to dive deeper into the dos and don’ts of scaling.

Scaling can be tricky – even large corporations often fumble or make mistakes while trying to expand. But with some tried and tested steps, you can grow your business in a safe way, without risking it all.

5 SIMPLE STEPS TO SCALE YOUR COACHING BUSINESS QUICKLY & EFFICIENTLY

1. AUTOMATE, AUTOMATE, AUTOMATE

Before investing your hard-earned revenue into growth opportunities, review all the tasks that are essential to your business and decide what can be automated or delegated.

In order to scale appropriately, you’re going to need time, and automating certain tasks will open up hours each day that you didn’t have before. This can be as simple as setting up a reoccurring calendar appointment to having your pet’s food auto-ship every month.

It’s important to remember while your enthusiasm and motivation can be limitless, you don’t have to do it all to be successful. Building a thriving business takes a village and when you’re trying to scale, you need to tap into your network more than ever.

2. GET STRICT WITH TIME MANAGEMENT

When you’re ready to scale, time is one of the most important things you need. Time cannot be bought, but it can be gained, as mentioned previously with good automation and delegation techniques.

Once you’ve established the tasks that you will personally need to complete each day, it’s time to create strict time parameters for how long you should spend on each one. This is also a good opportunity to assess if you can complete a task more efficiently.

For example, creating content for your social media channels is important, but it can be too easy to get caught up in the nuances of colors and filters, which can lead to valuable time being lost. A great solution for this is to create a style guide and posting process so you know exactly what to post each day.

3. CREATE A WEEKLY ROAD MAP

Scaling will take up more of your time, but it doesn’t need to take up all of your time. You started your business as a way to achieve more work-life balance, and it’s important not to lose sight of that initial goal.

Once you’ve established your ideal time parameters for working on certain tasks, it’s time to decide what day to do each one. While it may seem nice to create content for an hour each morning, it is more efficient to dedicate several hours in one day. This allows you to give the task your full attention and reduces the risk of “leaning on tomorrow” to put off getting work completed.

Don’t forget to include time for exercise, downtime, and other hobbies, too. These things are just as important as the morning meeting with a potential investor and shouldn’t be skipped. Of course, life happens, and you may not stick to your map exactly, but having a concrete yet adaptable blueprint allows you to easily come back to it if you go off track.

4. MEASURE YOUR GOALS

Scaling your business is a goal in of itself, but you also need to be tracking the effort you’re putting into this goal if you want to be successful.

Looking at your road map and the tasks you’ve assigned to yourself each day, establish a way to track and assess each one. For example, your content goal might be to grow your audience by 50% within 6 months. But since you’re only dedicating a specific amount of time to this per your time management process, this may not be achievable.

Goals should be realistic, and it’s important to know you can change them as you learn and recognize where exactly time adds value to your business. If you’re not measuring your goals it’s likely you’re not achieving them, so make this an important weekly task by identifying what worked and what did not.

5. REVIEW YOUR OFFERINGS

When you’re ready to scale, you need to be sure your products and services are ready, too. Often people begin with this step, but it’s crucially important to get clear on your time, priorities, and how you’re going to measure your goals, first.

Group coaching is a great way to serve more clients in less time, but in order to offer an effective service, you need to ensure your coaching skills can have the same impact working with 5+ clients versus one-on-one.

If this is a concern for you, begin with groups of 3 and work your way up. Be sure to review your materials too, to ensure they work for groups and dedicate time to revising them if they need editing. If you prefer to stick with one-on-one coaching, you could consider raising your prices as part of your scaling plan.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, you’ll be able to levitate your pricing power as your brand and name become more recognizable.

THE TAKEAWAY

Scaling is hard, but it’s not impossible. Don’t jump into changing up your products and services before you first assess everything else that goes into business expansion.

Scaling is a big undertaking, but like many other things in business, it’s the small tasks that can make or break a goal. If you successfully complete the initial audit (steps 1-4) and realize you have some gaps to cover before scaling, that’s okay too!

The groundwork will serve you well regardless, and you can always come back to scaling your products and services once you’ve established a firm foundation on which to build your business.