Leveraging Your Team for Growth: A Guide from 4 Powerhouse Companies

If you're looking take your scalability to the max, you're going to want to know how to leverage your team. Leveraging your customers or team is something that will create momentum for your business, and help you build and build towards exponential growth.

If you are a sensible business owner, you should be using your customers and team to help build your business faster.

I'm Not Quite Sure What You Mean...

Think about a platform such as GitHub or Reddit, it encourages its users to create content on the platform, as a result the app receives hours and hours worth of content to fill up their site. In return, the users get a reward for their efforts, in the form of gifts or badges. This means you have all this content being produced for your business, without having to hire any content creators - you have leveraged your customers.

If You're Still Unsure, Here's a Few Examples

Here's a few examples of other businesses that did an amazing job leveraging people around them, to help you

Go1

Go1 became "the Spotify of corporate learning", they don't own the content of their business, instead they own the curation of other people's content. By presenting it in an easy way for customers (they provide a clip to each author), they have managed to build a huge collection of valuable content, without having to create it themselves.

If you are creating content for your business, think about how your customers or team could help you speed up the process. You save hours of work that you could have spent trying to fill your platform with content, which you can now spend growing your business.

Supermarkets

You don't just have to be a tech company to leverage your team. Some of the big supermarkets overseas pay people a piece rate for every competitor label someone logs through an app - so they have an army of consumers getting all their competitor data for them. It's super easy! You could have hired someone full time to do that work, but by leveraging your customers, you have found a cheap and effective solution.

My Own Company

In my last company we built a platform where our trainers could post articles, and share their knowledge and expertise. So if you were a customer attending a course, you'd be able to pay for access to the platform which was filled with curated content. It was filled with things like, articles, latest trends, professional development courses, and live webinars. By leveraging individual trainers, I could create more value for all students attending a course.

Think about how much more work it would take without leveraging our trainers... you are saving yourself hours of work, and creating a much more scalable and effective business model.

How Do I Leverage My Own Customers

There's a ton of ways you could leverage your crowd, consumers, customers, users or even employees to create content for your business. It doesn't have to cost a lot, but you want to consider that these people need some sort of reward. It can be anything - even views and attention is a reward, think about how social media platforms encourage people to create content.

If you're looking to leverage people in your business, it can be broken down into 3 important questions:

• How can you leverage the time of your community, users, clients, or employees to put their unique knowledge on your platform?
• How can they help you accelerate how rapidly, so you could create more value for other customers?
• How could you reward them or recognise them for it?