5 Things You Must Do Before You Scale Your Business

You might not know this, but some of the work needed to scale your business starts before you even start making an income. So if you are listening to this episode and feel like you might not be at the stage where you need to start scaling your business, you better keep listening - because it starts NOW!

Provide Free Value

The first step in scaling your business is providing free value. You might be wondering how you can scale your business by giving away value for free - but this is where all great online businesses begin to grow. This is actually one of the important parts of long-term growth and scalability. This is when you build trust with your audience and leave them wanting just a little bit more. By creating this free value consistently over time, you are also building a library of content for future viewers, clients, or customers. If you use a platform like YouTube or Podcast, these pieces of value can be lead generators for years to come - which means this free value can funnel leads into your business now and in the future. But what’s the point of having these lead generators if you have nowhere to lead them to? This is where the next step comes in.

Create a Small Offering

While you are in the process of building up that library of free value, you need to work on your first tried and true offer. This could be something ranging from $25-$100. This small offering will be affordable and jam-packed with value. You will want this to be something that solves a problem your audience is currently having. Who is watching or listening to that free value that you have been providing? What are their pain points? Create this offer for them.

Though this small offer needs to relate back to your free value, you also need to think ahead and make sure it relates to a bigger offer you haven’t created yet. The goal of this small offering is to be a stepping stone to your bigger offering.

💡 Pro tip: Always lean towards too much. What I mean by that is if you feel like you’re giving away too much for the price you’re charging, keep it as is. You would rather provide too much, than too little. If you under-deliver on this small over, there is no chance someone will invest more into your products or services.

Continue Nurturing with Value & Consistency

Before jumping into any future offers, you need to continue nurturing your audience by providing them with more value and consistency. Just like nurturing any relationship, you have to be there and feed your relationship to strengthen it.

The question is where and how do you build this relationship with your audience. It’s important to build your presence on social media, but also to drive them to your email list as well. If you want to learn about the importance of growing an email list (and how to do it) check out our podcast episode from earlier this month. If you can post consistently on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube, as well as maybe send out a weekly newsletter - this will help continue building your audience, and also develop a deeper relationship with them as well.

It’s a lot to balance multiple platforms, so if you need a little help, grab my Notion Content Calendar Template, this is my custom Notion system for organizing content ideas and plans across platforms. Whether you’re creating on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or a podcast (or any combination of them!) this content calendar will work for you. This is the system I use to stay organized and consistent with all of my content.

Plus, this content calendar comes with an in-depth video tutorial showing you how to use the calendar, and how to customize it further for your own needs. Anyway, this will be linked in the show notes for you. Now that you have nurtured your audience, it’s time to up the ante with a bigger offer.

Create a Big Offering

Now that you have provided tons of free value, gotten feedback on your small offering, and continued nurturing your audience, it’s time to offer them something bigger. This offer might run from $100-$1000. Just like your small offer, you want to make sure this bigger one is also jam-packed with value and solves a problem your audience is having. This should be an extension of your smaller offer - a deeper dive into solving the same or a similar problem, so that long-term, this could be an upsell or something you can offer those who have already purchased your smaller product as well.

Everyone has a different strategy on what a bigger offer should be - but in my opinion, it should be something that can sell consistently, something that will resonate with your audience or niche long-term, and something you can easily refine overtime if needed to stay current. You can always create offerings outside of this one eventually that are more timely, but this first big offer needs to be your signature offer that can serve the bulk of your audience.

Creating Systems & Procedures

Throughout this journey you’re going on, you will find repetitive tasks, things that work, things that don’t work, etc. It’s time to set some systems and procedures that will help some of this run on autopilot so that you can continue working on the next big thing, that way you’re not halting your growth by being unorganized or overwhelmed.

My suggestion is to take a week and write down how you are spending your time. How long do you spend replying to emails? Is there any way you could have saved yourself some time - like auto-response emails or email templates you could create? How long are you spending creating Instagram graphics in Canva? Could you maybe create some Canva templates that would make that process faster? Maybe by this stage, you can hire an assistant to help you with some of these smaller tasks, but if you’re not there yet - find ways you can make them more streamlined.

Another tip to help keep things running smoothly is to create specific procedures. When you are writing down how you are spending your time, also write down the process of each of those tasks. Is there any way you can make that process easier or less time? Does it make sense to do two of those tasks back to back, maybe if they’re both being done on the same platform? Once you come up with specific procedures for each task, you can use those details to decide when is the best time to do those tasks throughout the week - which will help you develop a schedule that will truly help you move the needle in your business.

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I really hope these 5 steps help provide you with a roadmap to scaling your business, if you want me to dive deeper into any of these topics, please let us know by sending a DM to the Creatorly Instagram, which is @creatorlymedia.