There are some specific challenges when attempting to scale a professional services business, as it is not a business selling physical goods; instead, it relies upon the time and knowledge of its employees.

How can you expand your business without requiring additional time and effort from employees when you only have a certain number of workers, and each has a limited amount of hours in the day?

There are key areas to focus on to enable business and professional service scaling. Importantly, it must be taken into account that scaling your business will involve your greatest asset; your employees and a thorough plan is required to not grow at your employees’ expense.

There are only so many hours in the day, so it is critical to use time wisely.

This blog looks at key areas to focus on to make scaling a professional business service a smooth process.

Work-life balance

This underpins many areas we shall explore in this blog. For each of us, a positive work balance will entail something different. It’s more important to ensure everyone feels happy and fulfilled in both aspects of life rather than dividing your time equally between work and pleasure.

A good balance might be: having enough time to sleep well, eat well, and fulfil work deadlines while still finding time for family and friends, and importantly not thinking about work when at home.

Let’s explore ways this can be implemented whilst considering development strategies for professional services.

Structure

We are not talking about the fundamental structure of the company; for example, if you are a partnership or limited company, we mean the frame for the business to be strong enough to scale.

The sea change in the working environment, including hybrid working, hot desking, and flexible hours, are primary ways to ensure your employees are thriving and thus helping your business grow.

This way of working also opens up the possibilities of outsourcing whilst scaling the company without the commitment of taking on an employee full-time and the financial implications of doing so.

It is essential to invest in having a steady, trusted management team and employees that can efficiently assist with important tasks and leave you free to concentrate on scaling the core business.

Artificial Intelligence and systemisation

Keeping in mind efficiency and streamlining, thus freeing up the time to plan and scale a professional services company, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fantastic business tool.

From simply having in place chatbots on your website to enable smaller time thief queries to be answered to implementing Business Process Management, which will streamline your documents, either in-house, if a small company, or outsourced if there are a larger amount of documents to be processed each week.

Again, this is crucially looking at time-saving methods to increase free time for expansion.

Many AI tools can assist across different aspects of the business, helping to measure, improve, optimise, and automate business processes.

This is all with the goal of systemising your business. This is one of the biggest things we work on with our clients – to create and document a system for tasks which need to be carried out repeatedly. This ensures they are carried out to a consistent standard, that anyone (who has been suitably trained) can complete them and takes the burden of the task away from the business owner.

Customer service

Today, offering the best customer service is actually the key to developing a successful service-based organisation. Ensuring your team create a smooth environment that engages your clients, fosters trust, and yields devoted customers is the best way to distinguish your brand.

Utilise team members with outstanding customer service abilities and devote time and money to their training if you want to ensure your company is standing out from the crowd.

Then, with this excellent reputation, ensure you are shouting it from the rooftops by getting client testimonials, reviews and case studies to ensure any potential clients can clearly see the diligent work your team does for customer service!

Develop and invest in the right people within your business to enable you to delegate (more on that later!)

Pricing

As your business begins to scale, as your team is established, happy, and your customer service is fantastic, you will need to begin to look at your worth; at the point of seeing a scaling plan start to come to fruition, the next step is ‘what should my hourly rate be?’

Pricing should reflect the growth in the company and the professional services you offer, ensure that you review competitors’ pricing, and ascertain the growth in the company and projected yearly forecast.

There is always the concern that you may lose some clients from this, however also stand firm and consider that you should end up with most staying with you, due to your excellent service and so if you end up with fewer clients but the ones that remain at the higher price, it will enable you to take on more clients on this rate and not affect the amount of staff and processes, thus making a far better profit margin.

Have a clear value proposition which communicates and justifies your price point.

Delegation

Delegation is something many business owners struggle with. There are a myriad of reasons for this from them not trusting others to complete tasks to the standard they want it done by, they don’t feel like they have the time to train someone else (the misconception it is quicker to do it themselves!) through to wanting to control and be responsible for those tasks.

Whatever the reason, the lack of delegation has a real-world negative impact on a business. It can be demotivating for the senior team and leave little room for their professional development and sense of responsibility to the business. As a business owner, you also have less time to spend on scaling the business.

So here are some things to consider to enable greater delegation.

It’s important to avoid just selling your own time if you want to establish a service-based business.

You should hire the best people to do the job, then use your excellent reputation to attract new customers that these employees can work with.

Since individuals frequently have the greatest relationship and confidence with the directors/partners, this can be challenging.

However, if you successfully “sell” your customers on the additional expertise you have on hand and reassure them that the service you provide goes above and beyond their requirements, they will be happy. In addition, with the systems you now have in place, you can be confident in the consistent quality of the work which will be delivered.

Once again, asking these satisfied customers for recommendations has proven to be the simplest approach to expanding business.

With the tremendous potential for scaling a business from a good, trusted, and recommended name, there needs to be careful planning and a clear direction for the company, considering all of the above mentioned and more.

How can Growth Coach help to scale your business?

At UK Growth Coach, we offer a complimentary 90-minute business review.

You can book an appointment to discuss the scalability and future plans of your business with one of our coaches, with a view to you having:

• Clarity on what needs to be improved
• An understanding of how your business can grow and move forward
• Options for working with a coach to accelerate your progress

UK Growth Coach is a business coach for professional business services. Book your complimentary 90-minute business review by getting in touch with us today.

For more information about how we can support you and your business, please call us at +44 (0)1444 440500, or email me at Tim Rylatt at tim@growthcoach.co.uk.