Scale Up Checklist: The 5 Best Ways to Ensure Business Expansion Success

Posted on: September 26th, 2017

Business Expansion Success Growth takes on many forms for middle market companies. Just like a GPS, it can vary in directions–expanding regionally, by adding new products, or by selling into different customer channels.

Deciding how and when to expand is an important task on the road to success. It flows from an honest assessment of a company’s operational foundation, and the soundness of their processes and systems.

Here’s a list that you should keep on your dashboard as you drive toward scale up ready operational processes.

1. Define Differentiators & Play to Your Strengths

Research the competition and discover factors that differentiate your work from theirs–these are your strengths. Relay these attributes to potential customers and use these components as the foundation for your scale up process.

2. Know your Audience & Analyze Trends

Noting the trends of buyers will further progress your ability to play to your strengths. If you have an audience, you want to honor their desires.

Ask yourself what your clients enjoy most about your company and analyze statistics of popular purchases, website searches, click through rates, and most common questions from customers.

This data will back up your hypothesis and highlight the best ways to scale up.

3. Test & Reposition

Take some tips from new age digital businesses, practice growth hacking techniques by testing prototypes and then reposition strategies to guarantee success.

You can do this through polls on social media, asking clients to prepay for a product, or by studying how many people take the time to subscribe to a mailing list.

If the engagement isn’t there, inspect the weaknesses that deterred people and reroute the GPS.

4. Equity

Growth equity is the HOV lane that accelerates the scale up process by filling the funding need. While reviewing the potential that equity has for your scale up process, be conscious of choosing revenue streams that will be sustainable in the long run.

Check your current revenue streams and notice where you can make a viable addition that will improve your work. Focus growth equity on scaling up these operational processes to increase revenue.

5. Find a Growth Equity Advisor

If you’re looking to expand, funding will be necessary to begin the process and see it through. Seek out a growth equity advisor that can take care of this for you.

They will connect you with lenders, build those relationships with lenders, craft the due diligence, handle legal, and analyze operational and strategic processes. To learn more about what an advisor can do to help you grow your business, please contact me at [email protected] or visit www.attractcapital.com.

Elections have consequences and positive ones at that for the acquisition financing middle market. While much media attention is paid to the direction of the yield curve and the Fed’s likely rate cuts, scant attention is paid to the more important drivers of the acquisition financing market – business psychology and regulatory climate.

As the Fed decides to ease interest rates, middle market acquisition financing structures will benefit in a number of ways. The underlying values of middle market companies will increase leading to a higher enterprise value and lower loan to value ratios for existing portfolio companies of acquisition financing lenders.

The role of acquisition financing is infrequently elevated above a functional transactional one. When a business needs financing to acquire, they go to the market and source acquisition financing to supplement their equity investment to close the deal. Despite existing in many different forms, acquisition financing is rarely explained in terms of the value it brings to the acquirer.