The path to success for building an online business isn’t about growth – it’s about your ability to scale. While the two terms are often mistakenly interchanged, there’s a huge difference between growth and scalability. Scalability is key to growth and profitability, but growth is not key to scalability and profitability.

Growth

When you are “growing” a business, you are adding expenses at the same rate you’re adding revenue. Growing for the sake of growing can be really bad and growing bigger is not always better; it can destroy value by exceeding the capacity of your workforce and operations, it can put a stress on your service levels and financial controls, add more complexity and bureaucracy to your organization, and it can accelerate your business into a different competitive space where it will compete against more efficient competition with bigger balance sheets. Growth stresses people, processes and controls and fundamentally changes the dynamics and culture of the business if it’s not managed appropriately.

Scalability

Scalability on the other hand, is when you are adding revenue at a faster rate than you are adding resources. By definition, “scalability” is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. In layman’s terms, highly scalable companies demonstrate the ability increase capacity without a huge increase in overhead and have minimal impediments to growth. When you’ve developed a business that can add revenue without having to add resources, infrastructure, or expenses to support that growth  – you’ve unlocked the key to profitability and sustainable online business.

So, what are the keys to scaling an online business? High customer lifetime value and loyalty, low acquisition costs, and high operational efficiency.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value is a predictor of profitability of during the relationship with a customer. Improving your customer lifetime value improves your profitability and return on marketing investment. In other words, you can afford to spend more on marketing since there is a high likelihood those customers come back repeatedly, covering your acquisition costs. Improving customer lifetime value is often done through loyalty programs and customer service initiatives.

Low Customer Acquisition Costs

Customer acquisition costs are the costs of a business to acquire a new customer that includes marketing expenses, discounts, or incentives. When you develop and innovate your marketing strategies to improve your customer acquisition while reducing the costs to acquire those customers, you have built a scalable acquisition model. Business models fail when comes when the cost to acquire customers exceeds the lifetime value, or the ability to monetize those customers over their average lifespan.

High Operational Efficiency

Improving operational efficiency hash a positive impact on company culture, improves profitability, provides you a more stable cash flow, and allows you to exponentially increase revenue while incrementally adding resources. Process improvements, business process outsourcing, and increased training and development of employees are just a few of the many strategies used to improve operational efficiency.

While both scalable and non-scalable businesses can be successful and grow — only scalable businesses can achieve sustained periods of strong profitability and high-growth characteristics that are attractive to investors and strategic buyers.