The first and most important step to scaling your business is to truly believe you can. In the past, Imposter Syndrome has prevented me from pushing a business forward, terrified that I had already had my lucky break with my first business and would never get one again.

Instead of letting this fear trick you out of believing in yourself or your business, use it to double down on your efforts and prove to yourself that you are capable of succeeding

Be Honest – Is THIS the business that’s going to carry you to £1m and beyond? 

One of the hardest questions any business founder must ask themselves, and potentially the most heartbreaking. Be honest with yourself and think about whether your start-up is suitable for the endeavour. It may well be a passion project, but will it carry you to financial success?

In my own experience, my mentoring business has been a wonderful journey, which I keep running simply because I love seeing the results. But in comparison to my outsourcing company, VW Virtual, which has a far greater capacity for growth, the mentoring business is bottlenecked. Learning to be honest with yourself and accept whether your business is the one that will carry you through to financial success will ultimately help save you from heartbreak or loss further down the line.

Stop making the same basic hiring mistakes

Every day we are seeing start-ups fail due to the most basic mistakes in hiring. Now, every single business is going to make hiring mistakes. However, these mistakes must be made on roles and tasks that are not essential to the growth of your business. The quickest way to do this is to start your staff on low ROI tasks. Then, as your business grows, you can refine the hiring process and gradually hire roles with increased responsibility and skill.

Keep staff motivated 

As we all know, the financial incentives are often less likely to be attractive in a start-up company, so your start-up must offer alternative motivating factors to keep staff excited. A large contributor to staff motivation is the sense of community. Sharing wins, offering growth-based incentives, internal promotions and treating your staff compassionately will ultimately help you prevent a high staff turnover which can cripple your business growth.

Craft an offer that’s impossible to refuse

If you want to scale your start-up to a 7-figure business, you need to figure out exactly how to make your service or product stand out and then craft an offer that your customer would find impossible to refuse. By crafting a ridiculous offer, you will de-commoditise your service through superior value, and this will ultimately drag you out of the scrappy race to the bottom on price.

Don’t Forget the Basics

Above anything else, the real secret to scaling a business is simple: hard work done at volume will consistently bring results. Spend the time every day perfecting your business and the results are sure to come.

Elliot Wise is a self-made serial entrepreneur, business growth expert and mentor. He is the founder of Limitless Mentoring – an entrepreneurial skills programme for aspiring business leaders.