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How to Scale Up Your Field Service Company
When running a field service company, it’s important to have a foolproof plan to scale it. If you don’t scale your service business, you’ll risk allowing your competition to take over your market share, leaving you to play catch up. Scaling your business is an entirely different ball game, where you need to be streamlined and efficient in all of your processes.
In this blog, we’ll talk about misconceptions around scaling your field service business and the key points to get you on on your way to success.
What is the Difference Between Scaling a Business and Growing a Business?
A common misconception that business owners have is that they consider the word ‘scaling’ synonymous to ‘growth’. This isn’t accurate since both have different meanings. Growing business involves adding resources such as capital, manpower and machinery. It’s a linear expansion of your business in which revenue and expenses increase. There’s no provision for inefficiencies in business growth, so you might end up with a very thin profit margin.
Scaling your business, on the other hand, is focused on efficiency and ensuring that you get more done in the same time and with the same level of manpower. If done right, scaling your business can result in an increase in revenue without requiring any additional investment in resources. Businesses that are able to scale up are able to stay ahead of the curve. So, how do you do it? Let’s find out.
How to Scale Your Business
Scaling your business is not a project that you do once and it’s done. It’s a journey – a process that needs to keep repeating for you to ensure its success. Let’s look at some of the important steps to take when you want to scale your service business. This is based on the successful clients we’ve worked with in the past.
Nail Your Vision
Many times, businesses start with a very vague vision. You start a service just like hundreds of others in your city – so, how are you different from them? Identify your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) and build a brand vision around that. How will you attract your customers? How will you differentiate yourself from others? Is it the quality of engineers? Is it the advanced technology that only you have in your location? Is it exemplary customer care? Before you start thinking about making money, you need to think about creating a brand. Understand your customer’s problems and then offer the solution in your brand vision. Nail this part and demonstrate it in all of your brand communication so much that it becomes synonymous with you. Create business goals (short term, medium term and long term) based on your vision.
Conduct Small Tests
Don’t go all-in with an idea just because you like how it sounds.Richard Firth, MD of Viva Training Academy, says from experience it’s a good idea to tweak and test before scaling up. Testing business ideas first will help you to discover the right path and small mistakes are much easier to recover from. A good approach is to follow the 30-70 rule. In this, you invest 30% of your resources into a variety of ideas and then based on how they perform, you spend the remaining 70% in the top 2 or 3 ideas.
Be Your Customer
A critical point that many service businesses miss these days is that they don’t fully understand their customers. They follow intuitions when in reality, they should be following insights.It’s essential for you to create a customer profile and know your target audience. Look at your business through the eyes of your customer. Will you do business with it? Is this business addressing all your issues and pain points? Understanding what your customers want will help you to scale the right products and services. Also maintain good visibility of how your customer-facing staff is doing. Jon McNeill’s ‘Simplify to Scale’ Ted Talk is worth a watch on this. He talks a lot about preserving culture as you scale, but also on why you should spend 20% of your time on the front line.
Hire the Right Resources
Be smart in your hiring strategy and hire for specific roles. Understand the right competencies that your service business needs and hire accordingly. Get your people on board with your vision and encourage a culture of knowledge sharing and training. Skills and tech move fast and it’s essential that your team is up-to-date with the latest technologies and best practices. More importantly, choose the right people to be surrounding you, because they will influence your decisions.
Streamline Your Processes with Joblogic
Outdated systems and processes are the biggest obstacle when you want to scale your service business. Investing in the right software tools will enable you to streamline and standardise your business processes and bring efficiencies to the way you work.This is where investing in a solution such as Joblogic can help you manage all processes of your business functions and automate the tedious, day-to-day tasks. With this integrated system, you and your staff will all be on the same page and your customers will have the visibility to keep them happy with the progress made on the projects. Joblogic will allow you to schedule effectively, track and monitor your team’s output and stay on top of paperwork via digital quoting/invoicing/accepting payments. To put it another way, what if each team member could finish one extra job per day – what would that do for your business’ revenue?
Joblogic’s field service management software has been thoughtfully designed to help field service businesses scale at pace. It streamlines your processes, connects your team, and helps you to efficiently manage all job information and customer data in one place. With Joblogic, you can get more done in a day and so can your team.
Why not try us for free? Book a demo with one of our experts or sign up for free trial.