Updated on 2 October 2023.
You may not have the portfolio you want right now, but someday, you will.
Today, you may just have a couple of people on your team, but you know that one day, there will be many more.
Scaling a business goes hand in hand with growing your business, as the process seeks to make it possible for you to:
Generate more revenue
Take on more clients
Invest in your business
Sure, everybody hopes they’ll be able to eventually scale their business to the level they want. But many don’t consider the nuances of scaling until rapid growth is at the door, and they are forced into it.
If your business is at this precipice of rapid growth, you need to figure out how to comprehensively scale it.
Also, even if you are a startup or a small business, you can take some practical steps now to guarantee you’ll be ready to scale whenever you need to.
One of these easy, practical steps to effectively scale your business is using all-in-one software.
Here’s how adopting more intelligent, more holistic software can help you scale your small service business. See how all-in-one software can solve some of the common problems small businesses face when trying to scale.
Project management has a lot of moving parts. It’s not simply about tasks and workflows– you need to manage your contracts, keep track of time and expense, and keep your invoicing in order.
Small businesses often start out getting a bundle of software solutions to manage all these things. For example, they’ll have one platform for collaboration, another for contracts, another for invoicing, and so on.
Managing everything project management entails with a dozen different solutions can scatter the information in your organization, and in turn, often make team members feel scattered.
Rather than keeping your time tracking, invoicing, planning, and contracts in different environments, an all-in-one solution preserves it all in one place.
Everything is kept together, providing higher visibility for managers and owners into the health of projects at any given time.
It’s also more efficient for your team, who won’t have to keep bouncing back and forth between platforms.
It’s easy to get app-happy when you think about scaling your business. There may be applications and features you don’t need now, but know you will at some point. The problem is, when?
For example, say maybe right now your agency only has a couple of contracts open at one time. You feel like you don’t really need a full-blown contract management system. When should you start using one? Perhaps it’s better to wait and save money until you’ve got more contracts and you can’t afford not to have contract management.
All-in-one project management software will cover the bases that you need before you need them.
In the example with contract management, you’ll already have it ready to go within the same software. Creating new contracts with holistic project management platforms is incredibly easy: there are handy templates and you can reuse past examples.
Sure, your business may need to add new applications related to your services as you scale. But when it comes to project management, you don’t have to worry about switching solutions and adding more platforms as you grow. Everything is already there from a functionality standpoint.
Small business owners tend to feel like they have to do everything. It can be easy to get lost in the glittery promises of software.
You may end up spending a significant time onboarding new software or leveraging new features, only to find out they don’t really make an impact.
You don’t want to waste your time implementing sophisticated tools you’re not sure will be worth the hours it takes to implement them.
Rather than getting overwhelmed and feeling like you are missing out on important features, you can relax if you use all-in-one software. Once you get to that level where the more in-depth features make sense, you can then dive in.
A prime example of this is when scaling is capacity planning. When you’re doing capacity planning for a project, you can do this on a task-based or hours-based schedule.
For smaller teams with straightforward projects, task-based capacity planning usually makes the most sense. It may not be important for you to measure the time it takes to get the work done at this phase.
However, as your team and your client list grow, you may need to get more granular. To forecast more accurately, you can convert to hours-based capacity planning. Within the same software, so nothing gets lost.
When you grow, even more, you can even do the double whammy: task AND hours based. Though admittedly more time-intensive than the other two methods, this is one of the best ways to nail your numbers.
With all-in-one software, you can simply go into more functionality as you need it with this capacity planning feature. Just to name one scenario.
Startups often have the same problem: there’s just too much damn admin work. And it’s only going to pile up as the business scales.
You don’t want to pay talented people to do menial tasks you know can be accomplished with software. At the same time, you want to keep your data accurate and free of human error.
Errors from manual entry make a bold appearance in time tracking and invoicing, to name just a couple of areas.
When it comes to time tracking, it’s not that your people don’t want to track their time. It’s that doing it isn’t easy as it should be, which means billable hours get lost.
Invoicing errors can cost you thousands per year, and no one wants the stress of invoices floating in space.
All-in-one software can eliminate much of the admin drain on your business by automating tasks and leveraging self-driving features.
For example, you can automate much of your invoicing process so that bills are always sent and received on time. This will help your business get paid accurately and on time, which is super-important to sustain cash flow as you scale.
In addition to automation, self-driving features in this type of solution can make things like time tracking a non-issue, mainly because the software does everything for you.
For example, with self-driving time tracking, all your team has to do is sync their Google or Outlook calendar and their GPS on a mobile. With automated invoicing included, the software will automatically track the billable time and even create an invoice.
So as you add more people to your team, you don’t have to worry about getting everyone on the same page with time tracking and invoicing. All-in-one software automates this process and drastically reduces billing errors.
Those monthly software licenses are adding up. Some of your creatives are annoyed at all the platforms they have to jump through simply to complete a task. You’re not really sure if some of the software you’re using provides value.
This is a situation known as SaaS sprawl aka when there are so many cloud-based solutions at play, it becomes detrimental to the business.
When data has to get bounced around, the probability of errors and inaccuracies increases. It’s also a bad idea for data security, as sensitive information may be compromised during manual imports.
First, all-in-one software will help you out financially by lowering your software license spend. These monthly or annual bills are mostly configured on a per-user basis, which means you will increase your spending whenever you add a new member to your team.
But if you can consolidate what you need into a more holistic platform, you can drop some of those siloed solutions and save money.
Next, a slimmer tech stack is a more efficient one. The fewer platforms your team has to use, the more they can focus on doing what they do best.
And finally, the downsized tech stack is a big win for data security. Everything surrounding your projects, from CRM data to individual tasks, lives in the same place. You can easily get to the information you need, and this data lives in just one central ‘hub’ versus many places in the cloud.
In a nutshell, using all-in-one project management software can help you scale your business in practical ways that positively impact the bottom line. Here’s a recap of the benefits:
Higher visibility for managers and owners
Greater transparency organization-wide
No worries about adding more project management platforms in the future
Adopt more functionality as you go
Automates your admin (especially invoicing)
Makes time tracking easy
Saves you $$$ on additional software
Keeps your data more secure and accessible