How to Scale Your Small Business in Toronto?

This is the last blog in our series called “Setting Benchmarks for Small Businesses”. This series focused on explaining all aspects of small business expansion, in an yearly stage. In this last piece, we focused on post-success strategies for a small business to maintain itself as a successful self-growing entity.

Running a profitable small business in Toronto is a rare achievement. One can only get this with sheer determination and grind. Starting from zero and reaching a level where you fulfill the needs of your clients while making profit is commendable. Give yourself a pat on the back!

What comes next? How to take off from this point onwards? What is the next level to aim for?

First, Identify What Business Growth Looks Like to You

Before diving into “growing,” consider what this word means for you and your business. Do you want more free time? Because scaling can certainly allow you to delegate tasks and free yourself up.

Or do you want to compete with bigger players in the market? Your competition might comprise of multiple well-established companies with loyal clients, ready to give you some really hard time.

Scaling your business means you will expand your market reach and compete for clients more strongly in your niche. A couple of wrong guys hired to manage key positions at the wrong time, and your existing infrastructure could crack.

Growing a small business beyond your existing client list, with established companies already providing similar services, is no small feat! Buckle up, let’s get started!

What is “Sustainable” Business Growth?

Removing the fancy from the facts, sustainable growth means growing in a way that you can keep growing. Read that again and imagine where you will be a year from now, if you scale your small business sustainably.

A practical definition in terms of small business expansion is “Take it slow, Break it down, Automate the repetitive, Outsource non-core work, Repeat.” That is all there is to it! Sounds easy, I presume?

While scaling will offer you exciting possibilities, remember that you are a small business with fewer resources than the large corporations in your industry that you aim to be. So taking a measured approach is crucial to your small business’s growth.

Sustainable growth thus becomes the key to long-term success. On the other hand, Rapid expansion without a solid foundation can lead to future problems.

Tips to Scale your Small Business, Sustainably

Now here’s how you can scale your small business both for a long-time (at least until the next Industrial or AI revolution).

You can use these tips to scale a small business in Toronto, go through a small business expansion in Hamilton, achieve a small business growth in Mississauga or achieve a small business expansion just about anywhere in Canada!

Redo Your Sales Target

When you were small, you needed new clients. Now you are not so small so shift your focus to “keeping clients”.

I am not asking you to stop targeting new people at all but attracting new customers can be six to seven times more expensive than retaining existing ones.

So, what do you think is beneficial for your bottom line, to upsell services to existing clients or spend time (and money and energy) in finding new clients altogether?

Here is how you can strengthen your relationships with current customers to improve the rate of growth in your small business:

• Offer loyalty programs and special promotions to people who buy more services/products.
• Deliver exceptional customer service to build brand love and loyalty.
• Implement a referral program to incentivize existing customers to spread the word (this is the most optimized form of marketing, where your clients are giving you more clients.)

Build a Strong Team by Hiring the Right People

Your team is your backbone. They do the work, whether it be innovative, repetitive, super exciting or boring (in which case you should focus to automate it but we’ll talk about that later). Your team learns what your client needs and then does the heavy lifting.

So hiring people who have the capability to learn and grow, be upfront about their mishaps and offer proactive solutions on time, hiring these people in least possible time is your job.

Then you can make a standardized process to be followed by your HR team to hire quality people. And when you have talented individuals who share your vision and values, invest in training them.

Every single morning when they arrive to give 8 hours of their prime time of the day to grow your business, then it becomes your job to keep them busy.

Help your team develop their soft and hard skills. They may not be able to make every decision in your business but they sure are subject matter experts in their respective fields.

Learn to hire and then trust a formidable team of self-accountable professionals and you are halfway to the moon already! (Or maybe not exactly halfway yet but, isn’t someone capable of actioning on their own so much better than someone you have to micromanage?)

Small Business Expansion Need Standardized Processes

Standardization helps streamline your repetitive tasks. If you have to do something daily/weekly/monthly, record why, how and how many times you do it, either in writing (Notion’s a great tool you can use to record written tutorials) or using visual format (Loom is another fairly recent but stable video recording-and-sharing tool you can use to record video templates).

Standardizing ensures consistency in your processes. Create clear procedures for tasks like new customer onboarding, new hiring, project management, repetitive questions/requests from your customers and if you provide products, for order fulfillment etc.

If you are a spa owner, you may want to document techniques that your spa is known for, to ensure your new hires can be operational quickly. If you have a plumbing business, record the ways your employees should interact at a client’s house.

Write the must-ask questions when getting a new lead. Doing so helps improve efficiency in your business. It frees time for your employees to do strategic thinking instead of manual labor and “grow” their soft skills.

21^st Century has technology. Use it

If your competition is using technology to perform repetitive procedures and you are not, it is only a matter of time before they grow too big to be your competition at all. This harsh reality is because machines are better and faster at repetitive procedures.

You as a CEO should not ignore this fact. Leverage technology to automate routine tasks. Leverage it even more to automate complex processes and take over your competitors! Free your team to focus on higher-value activities that need human input. Here are some potential areas to start automating in your small business:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Repetitive Emails to your vendors/clients
• Management of repetitive projects
• Team member onboarding

Focus on the Core Strengths

Imagine a Spa and Salon owner trying to fix a broken sink at their work. Or a plumber trying to give themselves a massage on their own during their worktime. Do not waste time on tasks outside of your expertise. When you are focused on non-core competencies, you are losing money. This is the same time you could have spent doing what pays.

Outsource non-core functions and free up your team and yourself. The cost of outsourcing non-core functions is less than the money you will earn back by doing your client’s work.

And the cherry on top is freebies you get by engaging a proactive consulting firm! Not only will they keep your finances spick and span, but they will also ensure you are making the right decision at the right time to muster in a period of growth you have never seen before!

Grow by Partnering with Experts

Growing a small business in Toronto (or anywhere in Canada) necessarily means your financial position will strengthen.

You will have more money in hand, more money to collect, more money to invest, and more money to be responsible for. In this situation, having a money manager makes sense, doesn’t it?

We can tell you what your operational bottlenecks are that are costing you money, what new taxes, regulations and rebates you need to use in your business and how to improve your bottom line.

Because you are good at leadership, you started a business out of some people with problems and some people with solutions. Now, we are good at handling finances for small businesses like you. We offer a range of services to make sure all your business needs are fulfilled under one roof:

• Payroll processing: Save time and ensure accuracy with a payroll service that you can trust!
• Scheduling and appointment management: Maximize your team’s time and optimize resource utilization with our super-budgeted CFO for Small Businesses service.
• Monthly profit and loss (P&L) statements: Instead of shooting in the dark, start making data-driven decisions. Your small business needs more reliable records to make better decisions as it grows in size, and thus complexity.
• Tax preparation and filing: Stay compliant and avoid penalties with simple and expert tax support.
• Business incorporation and registration: Let us handle the legal process of incorporating a new business. You focus on running it!
• Bookkeeping services: Maintain accurate and organized financial records without spending a moment of your time!
• Management consulting: Get expert advice to optimize your small business operations and your team’s performance.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Business Expansion

Your industry might not have someone exactly like you. But chances are there is someone out there who offered the same services as you. Learn from their mistakes. I collected below a list of some common mistakes that almost all small businesses tend to make when they are growing actively.

• Scaling too quickly: Rapid expansion, without a solid foundation to fall back on, can lead to chaos and instability within your team.
• Prioritizing short-term gains over long-term vision: Focus on building a sustainable business model for long-term success. You may have to say no to lucrative opportunities to maintain focus.
• Losing focus: Do not get sidetracked by distractions. Stay clear on your overall business goals. If you don’t have a Business Plan yet, or need to create a new one, use this free Business Plan Template as your starting guide.
• Hiring quantity over quality: Invest in finding the people who can contribute “significantly” to your growth. Logical hardworking individuals led under your visionary ideas could be all that you need to expand a small business into your profitable corporation!
• Overlooking standardization: Standardization is key to maintaining efficiency during growth. Otherwise, the chaos will stay and slowly your team will grow wary of the tasks at hand. Don’t let it happen. Focus on standardizing the tasks before you hit a stage of apathy!
• Lacking agility: Look at operations from a bird’s eye view and see what is impacting your business from where. Then adapt and strategize your small business to respond in a way that best suits your customer’s needs.

Use an End-to-End Financial Service Provider

Make sure you find an organization like you, one which doesn’t waste your time, to help you scale a small business. You need stuff done, and your partner organization should be capable enough to do exactly that.

If you waste time searching for more-than-one solutions to more-than-one problems, you are heading into a time where you will waste more resources managing multiple relationships.

Instead, a CFO team at Tangent Consulting Services will monitor your profit and loss, do payroll, manage your taxes, ensure compliance with regulations and be ready to help you in any emergency.

We give you access to financial experts and talented personnel that can help scale your small business while taking care of all your financial and operational headaches. Reduce your workload to focus on providing services to your clients with Tangent Consulting handling your operations and finances!

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