Category: Helpful Things to Know

Tips to Successfully Scale Your Business

Thinking about scaling your small business?

There’s lots of great reasons to scale your business. Scaling often makes you more attractive to potential investors. It lets the founders/owners and other key people in the business grow professionally or allows them to focus on doing the things they are best at and enjoy most. And it can bring in more revenue, allowing the business to expand strategically.

Jeff Galas, CEO of OnPurpose Growth, is passionate about helping small businesses scale. But more than that, he is a process-driven guy who wants to make sure businesses scale the right way.

Jeff shares with The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show a bit about his structured process for helping businesses make sure they focus on the right things first, including whether they are really serious about scaling or not.

There are more than a few businesses out there whose owners say they want to scale, but their behavior. There are plenty of others that have successfully scaled, but left the owner(s) unhappy because they lost touch with the things in the business that mattered most to them.

Jeff believes that owners/founders need to be crystal clear about the parts of being in the business that makes them happy and soul-searching about where they want their scaling journey to take them. Jeff offers some insights about his process, and also shares some of the most common scaling mistakes he’s seen over the years.

Every business owner who has thought about scaling needs to listen to this interview!

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Making the Right Hire

Making the right hire for a small business is absolutely critical. If you don’t hire the right person with the right skill sets and culture fit, it may sink your business.

Al & Sarah Katz from FirstSearch share with The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show practical tips to help ensure the right people join your company. His first pieces of advice are around whether you really need to hire at all, or whether there are other more cost-effective options. Spending your precious investor dollars too quickly can lead to unnecessary cash-flow crises.

Next, he and his daughter Sarah share some tips on how to make sure you create the right job description. All too often, Al says, business managers come up with a laundry list of skills, without truly soul-searching about what the organization needs now as well as going forward.

Al’s been at this for many years, and he shares his suggestions for making sure your job description is spot on, and then that they process for interviewing and hiring is designed to give your business the best chance at hiring a great fit.

His daughter Sarah helps source candidates, and she offer some great tips as well for people who may be job-searching themselves.

It’s a must-listen for any small businessperson looking to make a critical hire in the near future. Click on the arrow to get some great insights!

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Grounded Entrepreneurship: A Guided Journey with Kokoro

Nicola Brown, Founder & CEO of Kokoro, is driven to help entrepreneurs and small businesspeople stay in touch with their human side.

Rather than try to explain what that means, she takes both me and my listeners on a taste of what that journey might look like. At her suggestion, I turned the lead over to her and let her lead me through a typical beginning conversation that Kokoro might have with one of their clients.

Some of her questions really made me pause! Like her first one, asking me to describe how I’m feeling as weather.

I believe she asks these unusual questions to get people out of their everyday way of thinking and help them stay in touch with their humanism and passion.

Nicola and Kokoro are bravely trying to change how entrepreneurs think, and our interview is definitely a change of pace on the show. Take a listen and come along on the journey, and see what it reveals to you and about you!

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What You Need Before Hiring Your First Employee(s)

Andrea Herran, an experienced Human Resources consultant, shares tips on things for startups and small businesses to consider before hiring their first employees.

Some of the most common mistakes are:

  • Forgetting about or delaying some of the benefit and employee policy decisions,
  • Hiring a salesperson in the belief that they will justify their expense by bringing in lots more revenue,
  • Hiring someone who thinks too much like the founder(s), and
  • Failing to focus on employee development as the company grows.

Andrea’s company, Focus HR, provides not only question- and project-specific H.R. assistance, but is also the outsourced H.R. department for several small companies.

She brings a wealth of practical insights to help startups and small businesses successfully hire their first employees and arm the company for future growth.

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Video Marketing Tips

Everybody knows video is hot. It continues to draw viewers and potential customers.

Nathan Wiens joins The Savvy Entrepreneur to share tons of practical video marketing tips. He’s a video marketing expert with more than 20 years’ experience.

He runs two video-related companies, NWC Media, a full-service digital marketing company, and UAV Chicago, which provides drone photography that is increasingly used in video marketing.

He believes every business will benefit from video marketing, and shares tips for how to create effective video, as well as how to do it on a budget.

He answers questions about equipment, whether/when to hire someone to produce your videos, how to convey your story, and how to use your video marketing effectively.

It’s an interview every small businessperson should listen to!

Plus, take a look at some of Nathan’s work!

His “bumper” ad: https://vimeo.com/703880175/6937ee0977

Sample work: TV commercial – brand-building: https://vimeo.com/793450297/2aabd28331

Sample work: Event Highlight: https://vimeo.com/752175490/88cfc01b26

Sample work: Video podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOdz4DhXtVE

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