Grow Your Business, But Avoid The Growing Pains!

In the minds of many small business owners, growth is a universally good thing. While it’s great to be making progress towards your long-term goals, if your business grows without the application of proper scaling, it can really come back to bite you. If you want to grow your business, and dodge all the hazards along the way, here are some tips to keep in mind…

Get the Timing Right

The timing of a new product, service, or any other kind of innovation, has to be right for the marketplace. If you’re too far ahead of the market, or you’re trying to jump on a reported gold rush too late, you need to have enough drive and willpower to make some sacrifices, and make your product or service work in the market you’re tackling. This can mean either waiting for the market to catch up with your idea, and leveraging the right resources to survive this period, or adjusting whatever you’re offering to something that’s more palatable for your target market. Make sure you’re constantly anticipating the needs of your customers and market, and making changes that will allow your business to stay ahead. This will be much easier as a small business than as a corporation with multiple conflicting interests.

Communication is Key

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Good communication is essential no matter what stage your business is in, but it becomes even more important when you’re looking to scale up. Keeping everyone in the loop when you’ve only got a handful of employees is easy enough, but after a big recruitment drive, you may find that your methods are falling short. Make sure you’re leveraging all the necessary tools and resources you’ll need to maintain good communication in your growing business. This could mean starting each day off with a meeting, investing in tools like this: alertmedia.com, or drastically changing the way you conduct performance reviews. When you make communication a priority, you’ll improve employee morale and managerial efficiency, and hit your targets sooner. If you neglect it, your business will quickly start to come apart at the seams.

Scale your Sales

You might have a unique and high-value product or service, and a brand that your target market is quickly falling in love with, but these things aren’t enough. You need to have a repeatable sales process in place to have a healthy, scalable business. It’s one thing to sign up a few new customers, and another thing entirely to identify, design, and then apply some repeatable sales and delivery processes. Huffingtonpost.com has a helpful article on how this process should relate to your sales team. When you can onboard new hires at the same productivity level as yourself, consistently increase sources of your customer leads, and broadcast an accurate revenue and conversion rate with no issues, you’ll know you’ve created a repeatable sales model. This isn’t easy when you’re raising a fledgling start-up, but a repeatable sales model is essential if you want to scale successfully. It can take some experimentation, trial and error, but all the work will be worth it!