As a start up what are the critical steps to scaling your business

First, I would suggest you to validate the idea perfectly before thinking about scaling.

While validating the idea, always start with smallest possible unit of a particular business, for ex: If you are planning to start a chain of departmental stores, start with one store and master the art of doing business.

The reason why I would suugest you to start with smallest possible unit is for following reasons:

Trying to scale a business without validating it can be disastrous, you’d not know the operational intricacies of business( which is variable from business to business), you’d not know how to make profits yet etc.
You have to master unit economics of any business before scaling for if you know how to make money on every transaction, you can scale the number of transactions to scale up the profits.
Now, that you know what requires to be done before scaling, when you are sure done with validation of your model. figure out the channels that can be used to scale business, (variable for each business) and keep multiplyinh it over and over again till the channel is no longer useful to scale.

Note that, scaling is what separates you from being a small player to a global player and it can’t be easy. Difference between your neighborhood store and amazon is that amazon scaled while your neighborhood store didn’t have a model that can be scaled.

Again while thinking about scaling, you have to figure out the model that can be used to scale in the most efficient way possible.

Let me explain that by giving you an example of any random departmental store(which is located at one/two location) (let’s assume it “Store A” ) and a departmental store chain that scaled(ex: Walmart).

The reason why Store A hasn’t been able to scale is majorly because it’s usually run by a business owner himself and he can’t create a mechanism where he can trust any other person(store manager) to run the show. Since he doesn’t know how to delegate and also he can’t be present at multiple locations, he chooses to keep it at one location.
If he decides to scale the business, he has to start with creating processes for everything that is a moving part in the business, Like, procurement, quality control, Human resource management, sales, marketing and advertising, etc. If he can figure out processes to run the show independently, he is good to scale.
Again, scaling has various levels. Processes used to scale from 1 store to 10 stores may not be same as processes that needs to be figured out to scale from 10th store to 100th store, so the entrepreneur/businessman has to be constantly looking at the business and modify processes from time to time.
Hope my Answer helps.

Thank you