Launching a company is step one... building it to scale is something that requires deliberate and careful planning.

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Launching your business is the first step on your journey towards achieving your big vision. If you ever want to realize the lofty plans you have for your business, then it's important to design it for scale from day one.

Scaling is the ambition of almost anyone who starts a business, but being prepared to scale all too often becomes an afterthought. That means you could risk avoidable growing pains as you discover the foundation of your business makes scaling unworkable or unnecessarily challenging. 

You might find your company struggling and failing to scale instead of achieving the steady climb to success you hope for if scaling plans aren’t considered from the outset. Instead of making the right moves, you'll either be trying to appease unhappy customers, making do with insufficient staffing or doing all it takes to keep your head above water. 

Creating a company is one thing, but building and scaling is another challenge in itself. Although this might seem daunting, the following guidelines, as well as having the essential productivity tools to manage employee productivity monitoring, will help you successfully build your company for scale from day one.

10 Ways to Build Your Company to Scale From Early On

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Let's look at some tips to help you scale your business from the ground up. We'll cover everything from the more conceptual stuff, like values, to the more concrete, such as cool productivity apps you can use.

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Start With Your Values 

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Values are the foundation for the vision, mission, and objectives of any company. They reflect your company's identity, beliefs, principles, and system of operation. Your business values will help you guide your company, management, employees, and function in the right direction. 

They define your company to potential clients, stakeholders and customers. You should start with your core values and make them a part of everything that you do. Write them in a way where you imagine them holding true far into the future when your company is 10x or 100x the size it is today.

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Think Big From the Beginning

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As a startup founder or new business owner, your mentality should revolve around future goals and aspirations. When you think big, you begin to see your company differently. In the hectic, involved-in-everything early days of a company, it's easy to get lost in small-term achievements and wins while neglecting the big picture. 

As much as the little milestones are important, what should be on your mind is where you want your company to be in ten, twenty years, or even longer. 

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Employee Productivity Monitoring

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The productivity of staff is a major contributor to the success of any business. There are many answers to the question of how to increase company productivity, and getting them right will position your team well to scale. 

Tracking how employees carry out projects, use their time, meet deadlines, and the tools they use are all essential productivity metrics that are key to scaling your business. Make sure you look into the best productivity apps for laptops to turn your team into a well-oiled machine that’s built for scale.

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Empower Your Staff

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Empowering your workers means encouraging them to take on responsibilities within the company. While this might be a risky step for a startup company, it has its benefits. As a business owner, you can’t do everything by yourself. Proper growth involves delegation of duties to those under you, establishing clear communication, and fostering trust. 

Although the results may not be immediate, empowering your staff means they’ll be prepared to take on more responsibility and work autonomously as your team scales, rather than you having to scramble to upskill them as you grow. 

Outsource and Automate

Outsourcing enables you to achieve and execute minor projects that would take your focus away from major work. It saves you time, lets you focus where you need to, and reduces operating costs because it requires less labor. Outsourcing allows licensed, knowledgeable, and skilled operators in those areas to carry out the tasks efficiently. 

Automating rote tasks early on will free your staff up to be more productive and support scaling efforts. It also builds an efficient and robust foundation that can easily scale as the company grows. Make sure to research and adopt the best automation tools for your team. 

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Create a Business Map

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As a business owner, you have a plan for how you want your business to operate and how to carry out those operations. But have you considered creating a business map? 

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A business map is a comprehensive tool that assists in growing a company and achieving its objectives. Creating a business map forces you to answer fundamental questions that will help you reevaluate your goals and objectives. Additionally, you can use work productivity apps to keep a detailed record of activities. 

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Business maps motivate and challenge you to reflect on where you started from, identify why you decided to launch your business, and think ahead to where you want your company to be in the near or long-distance future. This type of goal documentation is essential in scaling your business and will act as a reference to fall back on throughout the process.

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Invest in Technology

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It’s easier and cheaper to scale your company with technology. Advancements in technology, such as productivity tools, have made it more straightforward to delegate specific duties, manage disparate teams, and simplify tasks and projects. If your company isn't built from day one on a tech stack that’s designed to scale, you may be allowing technology to needlessly hinder your scaling efforts.

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Choosing the right technology also makes the act of scaling easier by enabling you to reach a wider, global audience. It gives you ample information on your target audience and enables you to create awareness about your services with the right online marketing strategies -- even more reason to invest early in technology.

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Hire With an Eye for the Future

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When hiring, do so with an eye for the future. You shouldn’t just recruit people who can help you here and now; also think whether they’ll be a good fit further down the line when the company scales.

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Look for candidates with the skills you need today, but make sure they also have the secondary skills you know you’ll need in future. It’s also a good idea to hire candidates who have been through scaling a company before so they can contribute with their experience. 

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Document and Build Processes Around Everything

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Your future self will thank you for building efficient processes for every task your team works on and documenting the results. Not only will it help you identify what works and what doesn’t, but it’ll also help new recruits to understand how you work so they can plug right into the company.

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Documenting your work process will help you scale the company more easily because anyone can pick up the manual you’ve crafted and replicate the results. That makes it an invaluable asset for training and optimization.

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Be Ready to Learn

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To grow, you must learn from others who have successfully built their company to scale before. Think about how they accomplished it, study the steps they took and the sacrifices they made. Find out where they are now and compare it to where they started from. 

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Did they have to change the brand identity? Hire employees across specific fields? Appeal to a target demography? What were they selling? What are they selling now? Understand their mode of operation, how they scaled and learn valuable lessons.

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Onwards and Upwards

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While scaling presents new challenges, requires a different mindset, and calls on a new set of skills, you can prepare yourself by using the tips above to set your company up for scaling from day one.

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As mentioned at the start of this guide, productivity tools and other apps that help with employee productivity monitoring will also help you improve your team’s efficiency so your company can scale with minimum interference.