How to Scale a Small Business: Double or Bust?

Nobody starting a business aims to fail, or for that matter, succeed ‘just a bit’. But learning how to scale a small business is not an easy task—you have to force yourself to think strategically, when it feels like what you must do is firefight immediate problems.

I should know—me and my co-founder built up our small business from literally nothing in the bank account at the end of each month, to a thriving multi-million dollar company. 

More significantly, we achieved profitability and long term security for ourselves and our company.

Perhaps some of the lessons we learned about scaling—we learnt the hard way. Mistakes are a great motivator to change what you are doing in your business! Every founder has to go through learning curves. It’s just a question of how steep they are. 

But, I don’t say all of this to scare you. The good news is: how to scale a business is knowledge you can acquire and, more importantly, plan for.

The question of when (or maybe even if) you should start to scale, preoccupies every founder—in this article we’re diving into the why, when, what, and how to approach this, so you’ll feel confident in how to scale your small business when the opportunity is right for you.

Before you get too deep into planning your roadmap, it’s important to acknowledge one core truth: the journey from scrappy growth to sustainable scale doesn’t follow a perfectly linear path.

In fact, trying to plan for every stage of business growth and overcome all the hurdles in advance is a fool’s errand. Even the Harvard Business Review can’t quite explain the five stages without some super complicated graphs.

After all, getting a business off the ground is an achievement in itself—the next stage is obviously, how do you keep this going, to achieve your financial goals?

Planning five stages ahead feels too much—instead, all you can do is avoid the common traps in scaling your business.

Importantly—scale is different for each business—we’re not all planning on IPOs. But for most small businesses, it’s about going from being a soloprenuer (therefore earning just from your direct sales) to scaling so you start to earn from the overall profits of the business.

The first thing to know for everyone though, is the difference between growth and scale.

The critical distinction that transforms how you think about scaling a business is this: 

• Growth -> means your costs go up proportionately to your sales
• Scaling -> is about keeping costs the same, but producing more

Let’s break it down with a simple analogy. Imagine your business sells refilled water bottles. One employee can fill 60 bottles an hour—so two employees should logically produce 120 bottles.

But scaling isn’t just about adding more people to get more output. It’s about figuring out how those two employees could fill 200 bottles together—by improving processes, using better tools, or organizing workflow more efficiently.

True scale means that as you grow, your output increases faster than your input.

To clearly understand what does it mean to scale a business, ask yourself this: how can we grow in a way that actually increases profitability, not just workload?

The signs that you might be ready to scale are often the same signs that show your business is thriving. Maybe you’ve hit your first-year milestone, you’ve got a product or service customers genuinely love, you’re consistently making more money than you spend each month, there’s some cash in the bank—and you're feeling optimistic.

But beyond those feel-good wins, here are some specific (and tangible) signals that suggest it might be time to level up:

• Your systems are breaking in predictable ways. If you’re hitting the same bottlenecks over and over again, it’s a sign that your current setup can’t support your growing business.
• Your customers are asking for things you can't deliver yet. When ideal customers start saying "we'd buy more if you could..." that's your growth roadmap for how to scale a company being handed to you.
• You're turning away profitable business. If you're consistently having to say no to opportunities that fit your business model, you've validated market demand.

The good news is, you’re not alone! Many entrepreneurs have written about their own pitfalls and hurdles on scaling their business—it’s always a good idea to find some good advice to be able to ‘see ahead’ for you and what you should do next. 

Having great business instincts is one thing, having them validated is even better!

If you’ve heard the phrase ‘that doesn’t scale’ it means exactly that—a hairdresser can’t suddenly cut 5 people’s hair at once. 

Likewise, the quick fixes and manual workarounds that get you through in the early days can quickly become major bottlenecks as your business grows.

That’s why scaling operations efficiently starts with intentional process design.

Start by documenting everything—not because you love paperwork, but because undocumented processes can't be improved, automated, or taught to new team members. Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for your core business functions, so you know exactly what the operational foundations of your business are.

A great example would be, how are you going to develop and use AI in your business? Unless you make your policies clear, you also aren’t signaling where you want to innovate and make investments.

That's what it means to be built for scale.

Businesses can sometimes adopt technology in a very haphazard way—based on recommendations/finding a solution suggested by Google (hello!). But if you are more intentional about your choices, you avoid a common problem that your tech doesn’t scale with what you want to do.

This doesn't mean buying enterprise software you can't afford. It means choosing tools that can grow with you. Cloud-based systems typically scale better than desktop software. Integrated platforms usually beat collections of separate tools that don't talk to each other.

When scaling a business, your technology stack should be your competitive advantage, not your bottleneck, so you can start automating and creating efficiencies.

Scale smarter with YouCanBookMe

YCBM is built to grow with your business—automate your scheduling, reduce back-and-forth, and free up time for what really matters.

This is where many entrepreneurs make costly mistakes when scaling a small business: they hire reactively to fill gaps or cut costs. That often means bringing on inexperienced team members who need lots of training—or worse, make expensive errors—right when the business is under the most pressure. The core issue? Short-term thinking.

Scaling your business requires what I call "force multiplier" hiring—bringing in people whose skills and experience allow them to have outsized impact quickly. Critically, look for people who have experience with the type of customers and the business size you're trying to reach, not just the size you are now.

Scaling a business can also mean moving from ‘Cash is King’ to understanding how to use money and modelling to help you scale—especially if you are considering taking on debt or investment to scale.

This means upgrading from ‘keeping your receipts for the end of the year for your accountant to deal with’, to getting to grips with profitability, cashflow, income statements, and forecasting. 

Consider:

• When will you get a return on your investment? 
• When are you going to see your margins return, higher than before? 
• How are you going to acquire new customers into the expanded business?

Financial modelling and business scaling go together—you need to be on top of it all so you can plan the work and work that plan.

Before you start to invest in a plan to scale, honestly answer these critical questions:

• Just because you are ready to scale doesn’t mean the market is. Are economic conditions, industry trends, or regulations likely to support or hinder your next move? Understanding how to scale a business includes knowing when not to scale.

Culture preservation: What aspects of your company culture are most important to preserve as you grow? 

• It's easier to maintain culture intentionally than to try to rebuild it after rapid growth has diluted what made your business special. Companies built for scale preserve their core values while adapting their processes.

Competitive response: How will your competitors react when you start scaling a small business aggressively? Do you have sustainable advantages that will hold up under competitive pressure, or will you be vulnerable once you're big enough to be seen as a threat?

Recovery planning: If your scaling effort doesn't work as planned, what's your backup plan? 

• The businesses that scale successfully aren't the ones that never face setbacks—they're the ones that can adapt and recover quickly.

Innovation review: Everyone’s talking about AI now, and as well they should—AI tools offer small business owners possibilities to scale and add value, without adding a proportionate cost.

• As a business you should be making sure you are taking advantage of all the ways you could be using AI to help you. Even if you just get really good at prompting one of the main AI providers (here are 5 easy prompts you can use to make life easier for marketing and customer service) you’ll be making a start with AI.

The "More of Everything" Trap: Adding people and resources proportionally across the board without targeting or optimizing for profitability.

The "Perfect Plan" Trap: Waiting until you have every detail figured out before starting, think Goldilocks—not to soon, not too late—get the timing right! 

The "Culture Will Take Care of Itself" Trap: Assuming your company culture will naturally persist as you grow. Keep an eye on how your people and values develop while you scale.

We’ve been interviewing many of our YCBM customers, who not only adopted an online scheduling tool to help them scale, but also implemented many of the suggestions above to get them where they needed to be:

• Barbara Turley, built up her business to be 350 people over 10 years (Virtual Hub) said, after learning these lessons, she's “less emotionally derailed by things” because she’s confident in her processes, and has good systems she can lean on. Her advice? 

Systemize, systemize, systemize: when I say systemization, it's not just process mapping, it's writing things down." 

• Mike Desjardins also has years of experience not only scaling his business, Virtus, but as a leadership coach working with many others. He now has 24 people working with him and hundreds of clients over the years. 
  For him, culture and values remain critical to understanding how you are going to keep your ‘core’ even when you get 10 times as big, which is the advice he gives to clients:

"We would take your values. We would take your vision, your purpose. And we would say to you, what do you want from your leaders? A year from now, how will you know that the culture of [your organization] has evolved to where you want it to be and that the leaders are showing up in that way?"

• Angela Princewell has scaled her family law practice to be an award winning firm in Toronto. She explained how she slowly evolved the team to embrace and understand efficiencies and modern tech practices—including adopting YouCanBookMe—which meant she only needed one full time receptionist, rather than two.
  Speaking to her, she was constantly asking what “efficiencies [we could be] leaving on the table?” This is how any business owner who wants to scale their business needs to think.

Here's how to start scaling your business:

• Choose one core business process that's currently limiting your growth and redesign it for 3x your current volume. Don't try to fix everything at once.
• Master the principles of scaling on one important process, then apply those lessons across your business.
• Document what you learn.

When scaling a business, you're developing your organization's capability to change and improve as much as you're handling more volume.

Remember, the goal isn't just to build a bigger business—it's to build a better business that happens to be bigger. Companies built for scale don't just grow their revenue; they grow their capability to create value efficiently and sustainably.

Your small business already has something valuable enough that customers want more of it. Now it's time to build the systems, processes, and team that can deliver that value at scale, without losing what made it special in the first place.

Once you’re prepared and ready, then you should be ready to invest in more marketing (and lots of other ways to attract more clients).

The opportunity is there. The question is whether you're ready to scale smartly enough to capture it. Understanding how to scale a business is just the beginning—executing on that knowledge is where the real value gets created.

Good luck!