How to scale your home business?

“I want to remain small forever!” said no home business owner ever. The next step in every business owner’s journey is scaling their business. The thing is, scaling a business can be incredibly daunting. Most of the time, you do not know what you are doing and you feel like you are about to fail. Whether you have experience in the F&B field or you just started for the first time, everyone wants to achieve a successful future. However, only a few who are ambitious succeed in this goal. Well here at Hawkr, we want to equip you with the right knowledge and tools to set you on the path to being a successful merchant. Let’s get right into it! But first, we need to ask a really important question, and that is…

What is scalability?

Short answer: Scalability is the ability of a business to grow without affecting its profitability. It's an ability to cope with increases in demand while preserving its organizational efficiency and maintaining or increasing its profits. Wow! Lots of big words there, in layman’s terms, it just means “Can my business handle an increase in sales without affecting my overall cost?”

Here’s an example: Let’s say you own a bakery and you have been averaging 300 customers per day. You’ve been in business for 6 months and things are going well. One day, you get a call from your cousin who is moving to town and wants to know if you can bake cakes for her wedding. You say sure, and by the next day, you’re baking 600 cakes. You’ve now increased your sales by 50% and you’re still making the same amount of money. Not only that, but you’ve now increased your workload and cost by 50% as well. This is a classic example of a scalability problem.

Now that we know what scalability is all about, let's talk about how to scale your business without running into any problems.

Business growth

Running a business is very hard. We understand that. Sometimes, you don’t always foresee future problems when it comes to growth. Having more customers may seem like a good thing as it racks up your profit, what you don’t realize is that you may not be able to keep up with demands.

Here’s an example: Mr. Gary has been getting low sales since he started his business. One day says, "I want more customers" when given more customers he says, "I can't handle more than 8 customers at once, I’m only one person cooking.”

What was this merchant’s problem? He only thinks about his “wants” without properly thinking about his “business needs” and what he currently has. He thought he could handle more customers when in reality, he couldn’t.

While it is nice to dream big, it’s more than just getting customers. You need to have a growth plan and learn to adopt strategies for the ever-increasing & changing market.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t want more customers. What this means is you should be smart to know how to achieve the growth you want in a sustainable way. Here are some things you should consider when you set your growth plans.

1. Make sure you have the necessary resources in place to handle an increase in demand.

While this may seem to be common knowledge, you’ll be surprised that a lot of home cooks never anticipate this problem once they start seeing a sudden influx of customers coming to their doorstep. Here are some things you can consider to make sure you can handle the demand:

• Additional ingredients (You don’t have to prepare a lot but is always nice to have just a little extra in case you have run out of something).
• Cooking equipment (maybe invest in a heater?)
• Takeaway containers and utensils
• Manpower (While this is not necessary as it depends on you and your business situation however if you ever plan to expand further, is something to consider once your customer base becomes too big and you may need additional assistance)
• Cooking for more or less than 1 customer. (Know how to adapt to the current situation so that you are able to accommodate any crowd without suffering too much)

While some can afford to get additional help, not everyone can and that’s ok. When that happens, set a limit to how many customers you first want to take in so that you can still provide quality service without overstretching yourself.

What can Hawkr do for you Hawkr can help you with the above by providing an online platform that helps you to take in orders, manage them and provide delivery all within the one system. This will allow you to focus on what you do best: serving customers the most delicious experience you can possibly serve. So, no more worrying about the administrative side of things.

2. Create a business growth plan that takes into account your business’s limitations and how you can handle the extra demand.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What would you like to achieve in your business in the next few months or years?
• How do you plan to get more customers?
• You know you want more customers. How are you going to increase your capacity so you can handle more customers? What are the next steps you need to do to increase the number of customers you can serve?

Create a to-do list and make a plan to move forward on what you wish to do and how you accomplish them. Doing so will give you an objective to strive for and pushes you to come up with new ideas if your current plans are not working out.

Example: Mr. Gary would like to increase his customer base to 30 more people by the end of the month. The first thing he did was to create a plan detailing how he can achieve his target. In his list, he listed needing extra storage space, a way to market his business, and a more efficient way to respond to his customers. After listing them down, he sets himself a time frame on when he can accomplish each task to move on to the next and to achieve his goal.

If you are struggling to figure out a long-term plan or any plan, you can always reach out to us. We would be more than happy to hear you out and provide you with advice that will help you get started.

We can help you with: coming up with a business growth roadmap, customer relationship management, marketing & brand awareness.

3. You can make changes faster than a restaurant can.

What do I mean by this? Here’s an example:

A large company like McDonald's may have a new item on their menu but it takes months or even a year for the new item to be available in all stores nationwide. It has to go through so many different stages before it can be made available to the public.

As a home cook, you can make changes to your business much faster. If you want to add a new item to your menu, you can do so without having to go through all the stages that a larger company would have to go through. If you want to change your operational hours, you can immediately set them on the fly. If there’s a problem with customers’ orders, you can attend to it right away.

Knowing that you are running a small business, you have more control over everything that goes on. If you want to implement something, just do so. Chances are it’ll work out just fine. However, if you want to implement something and it doesn’t go as planned, don’t be afraid to take a step back and try something else.

Our app allows you to make these changes to your online store on the fly and much more! It offers:

• Operational & Preorder hours changes
• Menu changes such as pictures, pricing, description, adding & removing items, and sold out options too
• Profile picture & banner changes as well as business write-ups.
• Store location and cuisine tags like Vegetarian, Desserts, Halal, Special Occasions, etc.

All of these can be done instantly by either using your phone or your computer browser. However, if something goes wrong and it’s not within your control to fix it, don’t be afraid to reach out for help.

4. Automated some of your processes, so you can focus on the things that only you can do.

As a small home business owner, you are Mr. or Ms. Jack of All Trades. That’s a great trait to have but it can also be a curse if you try to do everything all on your own.

If you can automate some of your processes, that will free up more time for you to focus on the things that you can do.

Here is a list of a few tasks that you can automate:

• Processing and preparing orders (This will save you time and allow you to focus on cooking.)
• Answering customer inquiries (Yes, it is important in the beginning to speak with your customers, but eventually, this is not scalable. If you continue to cater to every single direct message to make a sale, this will only hold you back because it is eating up your valuable time.)
• Making food deliveries (Delivery is never cheap and distance always affects whether you can cater to them or not)
• Configuring and setting up your POS system (Doing this manually alongside having to proper record all payments by yourself is tedious)
• Doing your business marketing (social media, online, print, word of mouth)

Well look no further, Hawkr helps cover all of these issues for you! We will be your representatives and provide you with the necessary tools to help streamline your processes easily.

Our services cover:

• An app that handles your orders, scheduling of orders, confirmation or cancellation of orders, and handling your payments.
• Customer service to speak on your behalf, answer any customer inquiries and track where your orders are.
• We help schedule and inform you of pick time of deliveries as well as cover the cost of transportation fees.
• We do marketing campaigns for you and promote any new items you would like us to promote. (Reach out to us about this, we would love to hear what you have to offer)

We understand the importance of a well-oiled machine and will make sure that your business is running as smoothly as possible! Let us lighten the load while you focus on the more important things to scale.

5. Why Facebook ads may not be as scalable as you think.

A hot take but here me out.

Many small business owners think that Facebook ads are the best way to grow their businesses. And while they can be effective, they may not be as scalable as you think. There are a few reasons why this could be the case:

• Every time someone clicks on your ad, it cost money.
• More people clicking on your ad will increase the cost of the ad.
• It doesn’t guarantee customers. (Let’s say customers click on your ad and it directs them to your DMs. They will ask you a ton of questions which is time-consuming. Worst case, it could result in no purchases at all. Sure, they may purchase from you but you have already spent so much time convincing one customer to make a purchase when you could have spent that time on something else more productive.)
• Another reason why Facebook ads may not be the best way to grow your business is that they are not very well targeted to your specific audience. This is because you are targeting people based on their interests and age which are too broad.

To illustrate my point above, here’s an example: You sell Asian vegan cuisine and use Facebook ads to promote your business. A few days later, you start seeing a crowd of people that come pouring into your social media pages asking questions about your menu items. Once you start explaining to them, what kind of food you do, this could result in many potential customers walking away. Why is that? They are looking for something else that is not totally in line with what you do because your Facebook ad is targeting people from all over the place.

Secondly, getting new customers through Facebook ads may increase your total sales for that day or week however, it doesn’t guarantee that they will be loyal customers at all as they may not be your target audience, to begin with.

If you need more information about targeting the right audience, you can read it in a separate article here (written by yours truly of course 😘)

We have seen many businesses that think Facebook ads are the answer to their prayers. In most cases, it is not. It is important to think about other ways to grow your business that is accurately targeted and less expensive. Perhaps should do your research and talk to other business owners to see what has worked for them. Or………. you can also reach out to us? 🥺 We would love to understand more about your business and see if we can target the right audience that would be more receptive to your business.

Handling everything by yourself, in the beginning, is tough but necessary to start a successful business. But running continuously without automating and changing certain things can get costly and it becomes difficult to scale up your business. Always remember as a home business that has multiple advantages against bigger F&B businesses, you’ll have to try many new things to grow. You can’t just try one or a few ideas and not do anything else. You have to constantly take risks and be adaptable. That is where we come in. We can help you take the necessary steps to make your business thrive. All you have to do is reach out. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Thanks for reading this article. I hope this helps give you some ideas on what you can do if you’re struggling to figure out how to scale your business. If this didn’t help at all, and you’re questioning my source of information….

Ta Ta!

-Justin