Academic journals are businesses, and businesses have indicators that can help identify when you’re ready to scale. Sometimes though, there might be multiple different indicators that point you in this direction. It’s not always a single data point or flashing light that notifies you of the need to change. As such, you need to be watchful and pay attention to the different signs that might be telling you that your business needs to make some changes to grow.
Growth is crucial to the success of a business in the long term. While many businesses fail in the early stages, sometimes the reason for this is because they didn’t scale properly (or even notice the need for it). But understanding the benefits of scaling is important for your long-term planning and success.
So, what exactly is scaling and how does it work? We’ll answer these two questions first, and then talk about the different potential indicators you need to be watchful for.
What does scaling mean?
Before we talk about being ready to scale, it’s important to know what it means. When we address what scaling is, it’s also important to address what it isn’t. Scaling is commonly mixed up with another term, “growth”. Your business might experience “growth” in many ways. You might hire more staff, or need bigger offices, because the amount of revenue being generated by your company has increased and is allowing for this. Are you tripling staff and opening a second office location? That’s growth—not scaling. Scaling is when you increase your revenue significantly, but do not need to grow other elements of your business accordingly. Not only do all these considerations matter, but they vary from business to business. Those of an academic journal might not be the same as those of an editing company.
For example, a 100% increase in article processing charges will lead to twice the income. But if you only need to increase your team by 15%, nowhere near 100%, this is scaling. Clearly, scaling is a more appealing type of growth than just straight line. Getting to a point where you can scale your business often depends on a number of factors. In a general sense, however, you need to establish a strong foundation that allows you to increase your output without increasing your overheads. Overheads are a critically important part of your business.
How does scaling work?
Scaling, broadly, requires a handful of things, but there is some disagreement on the exact specifics. Generally, it’s safe to say that for scaling to work effectively, you need three things:
- The ability to automate processes;
- A plan to implement changes over time;
- The ability to protect profit margins.
In order to give you a clear sense of these ideas, we’ll break them down a bit further before tackling the signs you need to be paying attention to.
Scaling by automating processes
As noted above, scaling isn’t just normal growth. Being ready to scale isn’t the same as being ready to grow. It requires you to maximize your ability to do work and (importantly) generate profit without radically increasing your fixed and variable costs. So, one of the best ways to do this is to implement systems that allow for more work to be done in a smaller amount of time. For example, let’s say that you are assigning English editors projects. If you keep track of all this information in an Excel spreadsheet, it can take hours to update the master file. On the other hand, if you’re using a journal management system that assigns articles, tracks when they were assigned, and emails the files with the click of a button, then you have greatly reduced the time expenditure needed by the spreadsheet.
Scaling a business is often about finding the right way to “grow”. Getting it right though can take a lot of time if you’re not careful. As such, knowing how to implement this sort of system is important.
Careful planning and implementing changes
Changes in your team, good or bad, can cause friction. The processes that you were using might have been more inefficient than whatever new system you’re planning to implement, but they are what your team knows. This is why planning and knowing when you are ready to scale matter. Make sure that you have a long-term plan to help you scale. Not only is that important, but keeping your team in the loop will help them adapt. In many cases, one of the best options is to simply start by using systems that are scalable as well. When you start, you might only have a couple of employees, and they might not need all the tools that a team of 50 would use.
But that doesn’t mean that the tools for a team of 50 are the wrong tools. In fact, many journal management systems are designed to scale effectively. Whether you have three employees or a thousand, knowing what tools will work for you in the long run can save you headaches in the present and future.
Protecting profit margins
Scaling is only scaling if profits increase at a greater rate than other costs. If you’re not careful and you start needing to spend money on unexpected costs, this can quickly eat into your profit margins, reducing your overall degree of success. Above, we noted the importance of careful planning when implementing changes, as well as the importance of using the right tools.
Fast economic growth is not always due to good fortune. Oftentimes, economic success is the result of careful planning. One example of something that you might plan for is to ensure that profits are up by carefully controlling things like fixed variables, ensuring that these economic sinks do not get out of control.
Signs that you are ready to scale
Generally, there are indicators that can tell you that it’s time to scale. Some of these indicators are obvious, like “having more submissions” or “exceeding financial targets”. Often times, primary indicators that you’re ready to scale are felt at the employee level. As an example, if under your current workloads, your team members are still having difficulties in handling more submissions, this means that updating your processes, perhaps by changing over to a scalable tool like a journal management system will help.
Another indicator that you might want to consider scaling is that you are needing to use waitlists too often. If the amount of work that you’d like to do is continually piling up, that might be a sign that it is time to scale your journal accordingly.
While there are a number of possible indicators for scaling, it’s also important to keep in mind that some things might act like false positives. Here’s an example, let’s say that you notice that you receive a massive increase in submissions on month. Your reaction might be to worry slightly and start looking at growing your team. Another option might be to scale by making efficiency changes. But what happens when the submissions drop off quickly thereafter? You’ll need to either let people go or reassign them. Submissions can increase or decrease seasonally, so understanding what that looks like for your business is important. Sustained increases in submissions and workload are good indicators, but momentary spikes are not.
Be ready to scale your infrastructure
Scaling isn’t the same thing as growth. Being ready to scale doesn’t mean that you go out and hire a bunch of people and your problems are solved. In fact, quite the opposite, because growth is not necessarily going to be increasing your profits. Planning ahead is a great way to be ready for these moments, but oftentimes, many of the ways in which companies opt to scale is through their infrastructure. Using a scalable system like a journal management system can remove many of these obstacles. For example, a journal management system can reduce the time spent on peer review and manuscript processing as a whole if your workloads increase, but they can also scale in the opposite direction if you’re experiencing a slower than normal month.
Sometimes, being able to take a step back is also critical to success. It is far more difficult to take a step back when you’re aggressively growing your company. When you are growing your company, it’s very difficult to then shrink it after the fact. Make sure that the tools you have are ready to scale along with your needs.