How to grow your business: Taking small steps
Many business owners believe that business growth is an easy, straightforward path from small to large and often fall into the trap of trying to grow too quickly too soon. This attempt at rapid business growth usually results in problems like losing track of finances and ineffective business operations.
In reality, business growth is a series of small steps that make manageable improvements to your business.
In this post, the business growth experts at Tax Agility explains the small steps you need to take to grow your business successfully.
Put more trust in your staff / Share responsibilities with staff
When you start, it’s common to oversee everything and keep total control over your company’s actions and decisions. However, you will eventually need to share responsibility as your company grows too large for one person to oversee.
As you grow, you would have hired staff to assist in the specialist operations of your business like a salesperson or marketer. Encourage them to take the initiative and give them more responsibilities. This will allow them to generate new ideas and efficient methods of doing things. They may even feel inspired to go that extra mile for the company by helping others and doing more than what was asked of them.
Having a core team of trusted individuals will make your expansion and business operations that much smoother.
Review and refine
Most business owners understand the importance of audits, but a surprising amount of them don’t act upon the information these reports provide. It’s easy to assume your business is perfect when the numbers are going up, but don’t fall into the trap of complacency.
Improvement doesn’t happen overnight as it’s a slow process of constant refinement. A business will never have a perfect, evergreen business strategy because the market is constantly changing, and staying the same will see you quickly pushed out. Get into the habit of challenging your standards, re-evaluating what your business does and constantly asking the question “is this the best we can do?”
Don’t wait until you face a hurdle to begin reviewing your current business operations and strategies. Adapt and refine as you go, and you’ll stay one step ahead.
Don’t rush into large investments
As the saying goes, you need money to make money. Rapid growth requires a lot of initial capital and one of the best ways to get it is through investment. However, as a small business, it can be difficult to secure essential funding.
Walk before you run. Small investments may seem ineffective, but they can help to set your company on a good growth trajectory, giving your business the appeal needed to attract more substantial investments. Smaller investments allow you to assess risks and identify potential problems before proceeding to wager large amounts of money. Investors look for many things in a company, but financial safety is close to the top of their list.
You can find out more about different sources of investment in our articles How to grow your business: Investors and How to acquire funds for your business.
Review your business infrastructure
There are two aspects to this. The first is the physical side: more products require larger storage space, and extra staff requires a larger office. The other aspect is how your business is structured and how your departments communicate and split up work.
It’s not enough to review one aspect and ignore the other. You must consider how the two interact and how they can contribute to business growth effectively. Do you need to hold regular cross-departmental meetings, or can your staff use online conference calls? Do your different departments need to be close together? It’s far easier to address these problems as a small business than as a large one, so take advantage of your business size while you can.
Look to the business growth specialists
Never be afraid to seek help. At Tax Agility, our accountants have years of hands-on experience in growing businesses, and we will show you the best direction to take when expanding your operations. We provide bespoke assistance with payroll services, accounting and bookkeeping among other things to ensure that you can focus on fulfilling the potential of your business.
To find out more about business growth for startups and SMEs, get in touch on 020 8108 0090 or use our Online Form.
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- How to grow your business: The benefits of risk
- How to grow your business: Long-term planning
- How to grow your business: Customer relationships
- How to grow your business: The human elements
