4 ideas to scale your service internationally
Service businesses are very easy to set up. Unlike product businesses where you must design and build a unique product to bring to market, you can start a service business just by making it known on social media that you have certain skills and are willing to work for pay. 4 ideas to scale your service internationally
If you want to scale your service business, then the goal for a service-based business is to look and operate more like a product company. The more you can package and define your services as products, the easier it will be to scale. There are 4 key steps you can take to begin this process and make it easier to build your service business internationally.
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Create systems and processes
Creating systems and processes for repeatable knowledge is crucial to scaling a service business because it keeps work moving through your pipeline quickly.
With a system, you’re more likely to have clearer communication with your client and your deliverables will be much more consistent. If you’re not already using them, from Inlea we suggest using CRM like:
- Salesforce
- Hubspot
- Zoho
- Pipedrive
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Know your markets
While you might set out thinking that your home market will be your largest, sometimes consumer behavior can surprise you. Analyze where traffic is coming from using Google Analytics. Consider not only where you get the most traffic, but also, which are the most profitable markets, by cross-referencing that data with your own sales data. This information will help you identify potential markets for expansion and can help you understand where budget on localization can be best spent.
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Delegate and build stable structures
The test of whether your service business is truly scalable is whether it can survive and grow in new markets without your direct, hands-on involvement. Many founders struggle with a perfectionist mindset in which they are skeptical of any other member of staff being able to deliver their own quality of work. To grow, you’ll need to trust your members of staff to deliver, or your business will continue to be limited by your individual capacity. While you might not find someone that’s as good as you are, the long-term solution is to refine your systems and put-fail safes in place to ensure that your team members can self-manage and effectively produce quality work even in your absence.
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Turn your services into a product
Productizing your services is crucial to scaling up. If you think about it, any service you offer is a product. Your clients buy a result from you, whether you’re business coach or a web developer.
Not sure which service to productize or even where to start? You’re essentially turning your services into packages. Consider what your customers are repeatedly asking for and where you make your highest margins. Productizing a service means putting a system in place that makes it cheaper, faster, more scalable and more consistent. It also means that you can easily train your team to produce the work without any involvement from you! Can you imagine that?
One benefit of productizing your services is that it makes your sales cycle faster because you’d ideally make your prices for each service public on your website. While some leads might be scared away or disqualify themselves, the ones who are interested already know what it will cost them and are far more likely to become a customer.
Getting these steps right will greatly facilitate the process of scaling your services business. Knowing these and getting them right will make sales, pricing, hiring, training, and accounting much easier and will become touchstones for your future decision making and strategy development.
