Before I jump into this blog - I want to thank the team at Oversubscribed for helping me pull these blogs together and support with my social content creation. If you are interested in raising your profile online, head over to Oversubscribed.
The biggest mistake I see (that I also made) is entrepreneurs trying to be the next Facebook, Apple or Uber. While these businesses are amazing and everyone should be thinking big enough to want to build something as valuable and successful, you need to get the basics right first.
Far too often I will see or speak to someone looking for investment on an idea or concept that they believe is going to be the next Uber. The problem is that they often have no track record, no business and no team.
While the Ubers of this world are glamourised, there's very little mention of businesses that may only have 10 team members but make millions of pounds a year profit and have a positive impact on their community. For this reason many young entrepreneurs will set out on a journey to create a billion dollar company without getting the basics right first.
After running a small business successfully for two years, I tried over the following four to scale it into a much larger national brand. While we exceeded in many ways - winning over 1,200 clients in 16 cities - some key questions would have helped me realise I had to change the business model before being able to scale. By doing this I would have saved hundreds of thousands rather than having to change it during scaling.
Here are 5 questions to ask yourself before deciding your business is going to be the next Uber:
1. Do I have a business model that can be scalable?
2. Can I gain the financial backing and structure to scale?
3. Do I have the team setup and systems to scale?
4. Does the business have a market large enough to make sense to scale?
5. Do I have the marketing infrastructure to onboard high volumes of new clients?
If you can truly answer yes to these, then you are far more likely to scale successfully.
But for many start ups (including mine) this wasn't the case, yet founders still seek funding and attempt to scale, because of all the success stories they read about.
While I want to change the world and create the next Uber as much as anyone, I also appreciate the business operators that are making hundreds of thousands or even millions a year with small teams and niche markets that don't get talked about enough. Often they are having a huge impact on a community.
At We Are Media we aim to help small and large brands get their marketing machines into a place where they can be scalable, but only if that's the right thing to do. If it makes sense to win 5 new customers a week then that's what we will do for our clients. It's better for them to have 20 new happy customers per month, rather than 1000 that they can't manage.
If you are looking to improve your marketing machine then check out our We Are Media.
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