Achieving a state of stability for a business is a pleasing and rewarding experience. Once you reach this stage as a business owner, you’ll likely be quickly focusing on finding ways to grow your business further. Growing a small business into something more substantial and competitive within your industry is no easy task, but the rewards can be unparalleled. To do this, however, you’re going to need a lot of commitment, time, and resources, as well as the help of your team. The following steps will also provide you with some guidance as to how you can grow your business effectively.
Set Goals For Growth
Ensuring that you have some goals in place for your business will help guide you and your team effectively. You can set many goals for your growth, including goals for you and your recruiters to fill certain roles within a specific timeframe, goals for your employees to reach new sales targets, and goals to improve things like company culture. Having goals set out for you and your employees naturally inspire people, too, providing everyone with more motivation to complete their work. Without setting targets and goals, it’s easy for those employees to start to reduce their efforts as they have very little to work towards. You need everyone on board and working hard if you’re going to start growing your business, after all.
Consider Strategic Acquisition
A common method that business owners use to expand their business is to essentially buy other smaller businesses in their industry, absorbing them into their company. This can instantly provide you with new office space, employees, data, and customers. This is a very effective way to grow quickly, but it can be somewhat more costly. You could also combine this with plans for international expansion, buying a business in another country, as it opens your customer base up to a whole new demographic. This could make for some huge profits if your business then takes off in this new country.
Manage Your Money
When expanding your business, whether creating an entirely new branch or adding new team members to your company, your money is a big thing to be conscious of. Financial management isn’t always easy, especially if you’re not entirely experienced with this. The bigger your business becomes, the more expenses and income streams you’re going to have to manage, too. This is why you should strongly consider using expense management software like that from Payhawk. This software allows you to do a number of things that can help you have a better grasp of your business’ finances. You can track your company’s spending, trace each payment, and even set spending limits for those with access to your budget. You can provide these employees with their own company cards and be confident that they will only be able to spend what you allow and have accounted for.
Hire The Right Employees
As mentioned earlier, a big factor in successful business expansion is having a good team behind you who can handle the big changes and adapt along with you. During this time, you’ll also likely be hiring many more employees. However, one big mistake that people make here is hiring people quickly to fill those roles and keep things progressing on time. However, things are much more likely to fall apart if you do this without putting proper thought into who you’re hiring. Instead, it’s much better to take your time and even delay certain parts of your expansion to wait for the right candidates to come along. The last thing you want is to hire ten people who aren’t experienced enough to maintain a new department or cope with the increased workload, as this could then harm your relationships with clients and customers when mistakes are made, and deadlines are missed.
Look After Your Customers
During this time, it’s also easy to focus too heavily on your goals. While it’s important to remain focused, you should avoid becoming tunnel-visioned on this growth as you risk ignoring other important aspects of your business. Most notably, you risk forgetting about the needs of your employees but also the needs of your customers. When you start to shake things up and make major changes in your business, there is an increased chance that mistakes will be made, and your customers may end up complaining about these mistakes. Having a great customer service department will help you to manage these issues during this time and can offset the damage that would otherwise be done if you didn’t work to rectify any of these issues that your customers are having. It’s so important to look after your customers as they are the people that provide you with your profits. Without them, your business wouldn’t survive, and if you start to lose customers during this period of growth, it may significantly impact this project, potentially even halting it entirely.
