How To Scale Up Your Tiny Business: Part 3 – Increasing Capacity

TweetSo, we are down to the last strategy that can be used to scale up your tiny business.

Volume.

Scaling up by increasing capacity can be tricky business for a tiny business owner.

More output from your tiny business is going to require one of the following:

• You do more work
• You hire someone
• You outsource some work
• You create better processes

Let’s assume you don’t intend (more likely aren’t able to) do more work.  And, in the spirit of keeping your business truly tiny, you don’t plan to hire anyone — this leaves outsourcing and process improvement.

Outsourcing To Increase Capacity

Outsourcing is tricky business and should be done carefully.

In this section, I am going to discuss outsourcing through freelancer and outsourcing service sites like Elance, ODesk and Guru.com.

I have had horrible luck with outsourcing through sites like Elance, Odesk and Guru.

However, I have recently found a firm that I can rely upon — and I believe it was due to the following process:

• I created a very small project — the cost was set not to exceed $150.00.
• I put in an RFP (Request For Proposals) with ODesk.
• I got the obligatory 25+ proposals
• I threw out any firm/freelancer that didn’t address my RFP directly
• I threw out any firm with less than 100 hours recorded on ODesk
• I then hired three firms to do the same job
• I rated them on Responsiveness, Quality of Work and Cost

I ended up with a firm that does a nice job with what I send them.  One thing I have learned the hard way, however, is that just because they do well with one type of job, doesn’t mean they will do well with another.

Now, I send them higher dollar projects and have been happy with their services.

The trouble with most of the firms/freelancers on ODesk is that they have never met a job that they couldn’t tackle.

Lastly, when outsourcing take special care of the types of activities that you outsource.  If you jeopardize your product or service in any way, you will have trouble carrying the premium price that we talked about in the first part of this article series.

Process Improvements To Increase Capacity

Process improvements are my favorite way to pick up efficiencies with my tiny business.

It is very helpful to look up from the grindstone once in a while and take a look at your processes.

Could you build template emails?  Could you use a tool to get that piece of work done rather than doing it manually?

Have you created work-arounds that could be fixed once and for all to eliminate wasted time and effort?

Process changes can be the easiest way to increase throughput and scale up your tiny business.

And don’t forget that some processes may need to be eliminated altogether.  If they aren’t providing value to you or the customer, cut them.

My Internet marketing mind always thinks about measuring and using analytics to determine what marketing tactics are paying dividends and which are massive time sucks.

What are your thoughts?  Do you have any experience with outsourcing that you could share with us?  How do you go about eliminating and fixing processes to pick up efficiencies in your work?

Image courtesy of NZ Alex