Every successful company gets to a point where you have to choose between two paths: Do you maintain the status quo and manage your growth slowly — or do your ramp up and scale your business model? Another topic you must consider along that path is where your enterprise payment processing strategy fits.
Because payments are intertwined with your business’ ability to grow, thinking about how you should scale your business can’t be done without ensuring you have an enterprise payment processing platform that can scale alongside you. But how do you know if you are ready to scale your business? Let’s start by identifying some of the signs — and how the right enterprise payment processing platform helps you during your next stage of growth.
If You Can’t Keep Up With Your Current Customer Demand . . .
This problem is always a little bit of a double-edged sword. You can’t grow if the customer demand isn’t there, but if you grow too quickly without enough demand, you’re likely to waste time and valuable resources.
Scaling your business all comes down to how you approach growth. By having the right systems and software in place to adapt to your growing customer base, instead of consistently having to upgrade and overhaul your platforms, you’ll be well equipped to know how and when you actually need to scale your business. For instance, if you’ve outgrown your current enterprise payment processing platform, it may be time to get a new plan. But a better route? Picking a partner from the start that can scale alongside you through a diverse portfolio of solutions.
Working with a partner like Payline can help you achieve the goals you need on your enterprise payments side. Because our payment processing solutions are built to scale — helping you drive revenue and boost conversions — your business won’t have to worry about outgrowing your platform.
If You’re Repeatedly Beating Your Business’ Cash Flow Goals . . .
Again, this is a great problem to have — but can create some difficult decisions when it comes to thinking about how to scale, and how to do so and still continually hit your goals. While some businesses experience a temporary slowdown period when they scale, your goal should be to strategically manage growth so your revenue streams never dip.
Particularly if you have to regularly turn away customers because you’re too busy or can’t keep enough product on your inventory shelves, that may be your next sign it’s time to scale. If your customers keep coming back — and you’re consistently gaining a new, steady customer base — then it also may be time to scale. When your cash flow is steady and business is booming, you want to take advantage of that growth, but only if the growth is set to continue.
Working with Payline’s enterprise payment processing solutions can also help provide you with insight into how to make your products and services quicker to buy. In turn, that can help make your plans to scale even easier.
How the Right Enterprise Payment Processing Platform Helps Your Business Scale
One way to know it’s time to scale, without adding unnecessary risk, is by relying on the expertise of your trusted partners. When working with Payline to manage your enterprise payment prcessing strategy, you’ll have the necessary tools to help you navigate your sales and customer data to better understand your projected growth.
Because you don’t want to create unnecessary risk for your business, you should always factor this into your plans to scale. Simply because your business has a strong quarter, or year, doesn’t mean that will translate overtime. When it comes to understanding patterns in your enterprise payments profits, you’ll want to rely on the experts.
If you feel your business has a solid infrastructure, a steady team, a solid revenue model (with indication the cash-flow pattern is going to continue), those are the sure tell signs your business is ready to scale. But the best way to ensure you’re doing so in a manageable, secure way is to tap into someone who knows the industry to manage the payments side of your business.
By delivering your core customer base and the methods they prefer to pay through (i.e. – mobile and digital), this can lead to better customer retention (and acquisition), which can help you better manage your growth, empower your team and think smarter about how to scale your business plans. When it comes to making your enterprise payment processing strategy fit the needs of these plans, Payline’s payment enablement services can help by providing the types of payments experiences your customers expect — through the platforms your business expects.
Anna Lothson is a content contributor for Payline Data. She previously wrote for PYMNTS.com, as a Sr. Content Producer, where she focused on financial services and payments innovation, fraud and security, emerging payments, and FinTech news, research and thought-leadership content across the payments industry.
