Hiring a BPO Service Provider: Is My Business Ready For Scaling?

It’s every entrepreneur’s dilemma: scaling the business to the next level. This often means expansion and the potential for bigger revenue. It also means more costs, more involved management. Business without risks is hardly worthwhile, and an efficient BPO service provider can help you with the legwork. There’s still the nagging question, though. How do you know if you’re ready for deeper waters?
This thought keeps most entrepreneurs up at night, and in retrospect, there are those who decided prematurely, failing after the fact. But then again, no guts no glory. It’s just a matter of ensuring the risks are manageable and well worth the payoff.

Priorities, Priorities

You might be surprised the first consideration should be personal, not professional. It also ties in with your decision to hire a BPO service provider to lighten the burden. One of the goals of scaling is for personal growth, to accommodate your personal priorities. It may be family, a newly discovered hobby, or investing more time in charity; your expanding business should make room for any pet project that adds value to your life.

Plot A Manageable Time Frame

Divide your long-term goals in a series of short time frames, to keep your scaling efforts manageable. If your immediate expansion takes a year to complete, what are your specific goals? Increase your core staff from 20 to 50? Branch out to a new location? Include a new service offering? Keep your scaling periods short, doable, and feasible.

Success with your start-up calls for celebration, and the best way to do it is to integrate your personal and professional goals. You’re the one who calls the shots after all, and the best reward for work well done is to improve work-life balance.

Here are some points to keep in mind before you hire a BPO service provider:

Scalability should be part of your business model by default. Now is as good a time as any if you’ve yet to plan ahead. Be a visionary and build your business for the long run, anticipating demand from an expanding customer base. How do you know if you’ve successfully scaled the business? You’re not scrambling to accommodate the flow of new prospects, for one thing.

Dig deep in your foundation. A simplified business model is more scalable, allowing you to transition with minimal waste. Logistics is an immediate concern in expanding businesses, something which should
already be resolved.

It’s counter-intuitive to think your human resource isn’t a priority in expansion, but this should be true to a certain extent in a scalable business. Recruitment and retention is still essential, but your business should be stable enough to weather (or transcend) the impact of any employee’s input. This is where a BPO service provider is most feasible; you’re able to focus on facilitating the expansion when someone else handles the details.

Eventually your business should be established enough to mitigate bumps along the way, even serious shakedowns. You’ll notice the decision to scale a business starts with your personal priorities; once you have these established and hedged, you won’t be fazed as much with setbacks and missteps.