When you start a business, the desire to grow is inevitable. You may have steadily grown or suddenly grown, or perhaps you’re flatlining and simply maintaining what you already had. A successful business lasts. A successful business grows. No growth or too rapid growth can ruin your company. That’s true for businesses of every size, from solopreneur to a corporation across industries and sectors. In this post, we’ll provide 10 tips to healthily manage business growth and how to integrate them into your own business.
Leverage Available Technologies
According to The Globe and Mail, leveraging available technologies to meet needs and address problems can be pivotal when it comes to business growth. You might not need a new receptionist or appointment setter, but instead, you could use a visual, calendar-based time tracking system like HourStack or Harvest , so you can block out time during the week that’s solely used for meetings.
Zapier can be linked to social media that doesn’t already let you post from one platform to the other. That way, you can send your Facebook page updates immediately to your Twitter and Pinterest or your Instagram post to your Pinterest. This saves valuable time rather than spending money and time on hiring and training. You could outsource fulfillment or utilize drop shipping to make orders flow better. To recap the ideas for leveraging available technologies:
- Use Zapier to get more done efficiently
- Outsource fulfillment of orders
- Utilize drop shipping
Hire Only When You Must and Judiciously
It’s recommended to hire only the minimum number of employees necessary and stick with a free, low-cost office or manufacturing space to avoid going under due to rapid growth. You can’t afford slackers, so you need a happy workforce that loves their careers and wants success. Developing a tight, smart hiring process that chooses only the best qualified, most efficient individuals who get the job done is vital. You’ll hire fewer employees by hiring capable people who can handle the workload of a growing business.
Stick to a Budget
When you need money most, you must manage it efficiently. Growth tempts business owners to spend flagrantly. This can destroy your business. Set a budget and stick to it. Buy only what you need. You should not undertake too much debt. Put money into savings from your first day of business and manage your growth by only borrowing as little as possible. This keeps you out of debt and ensures you can grow at a normal, regular pace.
Determine Where Your Company Struggles to Adapt to Its Growth
Sometimes you get hit by an unexpected, although welcome, growth period. You suddenly land more customers or sales spike. You can handle it by yourself, but you need to learn how. Many businesses have adapted the VSTA method below:
- Vision
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Alignment
You proactively prepare your vision statement, a well-researched strategy, business tactics, processes, and procedures that provide a structure that can scale and ensure alignment across your business. You probably do this on a personal level with making annual resolutions, but this business version has to work out as resolutions do for eight percent of the people who make them and keep them.
Cut Out Operational Inefficiencies As Soon As You See Them Develop
This can save you from manufacturing shortfalls, shipping issues, and other logistics problems. This includes conducting business in the appropriate order. You need your minimum viable product (MVP) first. Next, you need a place to manufacture the MVP and to conduct test runs. You only start marketing the product once you know you can deliver orders efficiently when they come, otherwise, your campaign can be fully funded but an appropriate manufacturing process is nonexistent. To recap the steps in cutting operational inefficiencies, you need to:
- Develop your MVP
- Locate where you’ll manufacture the MVP
- Conduct test runs
- Market the product once you know you can produce it efficiently
- Produce the product efficiently
- Deliver it efficiently
- Deliver it well-packaged with a great unboxing experience
Avoid the Startup Mentality
Too many businesses experience that first whiff of success and overgrow or try to manage the same way as always. Your business must change to grow. In fact, from day one, you should follow a kaizen mentality that identifies inefficiencies and implements a better way. Not all processes can scale. You may have to change your business processes and procedures to grow. If you say, “But we’ve always done it this way,” you probably just identified one of the glaring growth problems at your sanitation company.
Keep Your Customers By Maintaining Brand Consistency
If you began with an organically sourced product, you need to stay that way, even if you could cut expenses by changing your resources or materials. If you’ve always provided an option for overnight delivery, you need to maintain that. In today’s market, customers choose companies by their products and value proposition. If it seems your values change, you lose your customers.
Protect Your Company Culture As You Grow or Try to Grow
If you’ve always been a serious-minded organization founded by nerdy types who love 12 hour days, you can’t suddenly shift to being the “fun” place with ping-pong and pool tables in the break areas. You’ll lose the people that helped build the company in the first place because they won’t want the flighty people around them.
Conversely, if you found a company that targets millennials with a gamified workday, you can’t change to a strict work mode. Like a person, you have to choose your personality and stick with it. You will only attract what you are, so if you seem to gamify everything, you’ll get people who want to play instead of work. If you’re a serious-minded business, you’ll attract overachievers who want to excel and land at the top of their game. You have to choose your company culture and stick with it.
Pull Back To Grow Gracefully
You offer something no other business or company can. It can be really tempting to take every order offered to you and pile them up like a stack of books you mean to read. Like the books, you would probably fill the orders at the same speed. You may need to reduce availability and simply learn to say no until you can put the relevant suggestions from tips one through eight into place so you can grow your business gracefully.
Keep Tabs on Every Dollar
You’d expect that, since sales mean money, business growth would mean you have more of the lovely green. That’s not always the case. You might have invoices that go unpaid. You can ensure this doesn’t happen by requiring payment at the time of purchase or using an agency that handles the accounting for you and chases down the payments. If your sanitation business already has a glut of unpaid invoices, consider invoice financing, also called accounts receivable financing.
A business can obtain a loan equaling 85 percent of its outstanding invoices, then receive the other 15 percent when it repays the loan. This loan type can include high fees, but it can also see you through the tough spurt of orders for which you were unprepared. You can get the money to hire well or purchase a rush manufacturing order. Otherwise, cut expenses where you can and consolidate software used, so you reduce monthly subscriptions.
In Closing
Whether you want to grow, or growth just snuck up on you, and you need to learn to handle it, the key takeaway is you must identify the weaknesses in your sanitation company’s ability to handle growth. By tackling the problems using the tips in this article, you should effectively squelch most issues.
If you need temporary growth space quickly, let Satellite Industries help. Since 1958, we’ve provided businesses across a wide range of industries with portable restrooms, restroom trailers, restroom trucks, septic trucks, and deodorizers they need to expand on the fly. Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow comfortably.