Remember when you were a kid and you were obsessed with growing? Every year on your birthday, you would rush to the door frame to mark your new height. You couldn’t wait to be old enough to drive or vote or have your first alcoholic beverage. Even as an adult, you’re eager to grow your family, grow in your career, or grow your social circle. Growth motivates you. It's the same when it comes to businesses and enterprises.
A company can measure a lot of its success based on growth. Are you selling more products? Bringing in more customers? Reaching more potential clients? The bigger impact you have, the more effective of an enterprise you are building. That doesn’t mean growth within the business doesn’t create complications. As you grow, you are going to face new challenges and have to work even harder to be sure your business continues thriving and handling the newfound pressure. You want to guarantee your enterprise continues growing so you can create some security for yourself and the sellers involved in your business. Here are a few tips to help you manage your business growth and continue on your path toward success.
1. Keep Your Whole Team Connected And Goal-Oriented
As your business grows, you’ll have new goals and potentially more team members. One way to manage these changes is to always keep your staff connected and focused on your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). With enterprise OKR software, you can keep your team in alignment as you list specific outcomes you’re working to achieve. Use complete transparency and openness to keep even large enterprises inspired and engaged with the mission of your company. The more connected you can be, the more focused and goal-oriented performance management of the entire enterprise will be. This will then lead to more successful results and growth down the line.
2. Find ways to eliminate waste
Sometimes growth requires you to streamline your processes so you remain efficient and cost-conscious. As you grow, find the best practices for your company to eliminate excess waste and stay on track. Sometimes these processes can actually earn you extra income. For example, selling IPv4 addresses is a way to get rid of extra processing space you aren’t using at a great rate. Chances are you don’t need all of your IPv4 addresses, so try the seamless experience of selling them online to other companies who can use the extra space. Be creative and find ways to continue to grow your capital while eliminating waste.
3. Manage And Align Customer Communication
As you grow and acquire a larger client base, you’ll also want to explore ways to simplify the customer journey. Every customer interaction is vital to the growth of your company, so make sure all communication channels are effective and inviting. Through an omni channel call center, your enterprise can utilize all digital channel communications and connect them through one OmniChannel experience. You’ll be able to analyze and understand customer service issues from live chat, phone calls, and internet interactions all in one place. This streamlines your systems and takes the guessing out of customer expectations and allows you to communicate with buyers with ease.
4. Stay On Top Of Your Finances
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is taking your growth for granted. Just because you’re growing now and have extra capital and funding doesn’t mean that will last forever. Stay on top of your finances. Continue working to cut extraneous costs while monitoring your cash flow. As your business grows and changes so will your financial situation. Make a detailed plan and forecast for how you will spend your money through the next several years. Set company goals that are manageable and reasonable with your current financial picture and where you think you could go.
5. Don’t Overextend Yourself
Your company has grown and thrived because you’re good at what you do. That doesn’t mean you need to suddenly change everything and overextend yourself. Stay focused on what you do best. For example, if a pizza place has been named the best pizza in your city, they should stick to making pizza, right? If they all of the sudden started also serving tacos, they probably won’t be as good and the quality of the pizza could end up suffering. Moral of the story is don’t try to be something you’re not just because you’re growing. Stay the course and focus on your strengths. Use benchmarks to mark your progress and focus on the task at hand. This will help you gain confidence and pride in the long run as well.
6. Adapt To The Changing Scale Of Your Business
Often, businesses will prepare for the expectation that you may grow. This refers to your business scalability. You need a financial plan, a strategy, and the vision to take your business to the next level. This also means you’ll need to constantly be adapting your structure and connections to include the new elements of your business. How are you going to provide products and services for your influx of customers? How many new staffers do you need and what do you need to plan for financially to bring in third party help? How will your products change with expanding and growing technology that is all around you? Remember to stay flexible overall. Your business is not set in stone. Plans can be adjusted, finances moved around, and branding can evolve. Just be prepared to make these big decisions when the time comes.
7. Grow Your Staff
As your enterprise grows, you’re going to need a bigger team. Feeling overworked is a source of frustration, so if your goal setting is growing, your staff should be too. This doesn’t mean you can just hire anyone off the street. Take time and be deliberate and keep your strategic priorities in mind when it comes to the recruiting and hiring process. Try to find heightened employee engagement and transferable skills that can help you continue growing your company in real-time. Beyond just measurable skills in web chat or phone support or whatever preferred channel you need more employees, you want to recruit individuals who will truly fit into your culture. Who is going to add to your team with their personality and passion and work ethic? It goes beyond a resume. Get to know new potential team members before you bring them on. It will help your growth stay deliberate, focused, and exciting.
8. Protect Your Enterprise
Growth is great and exciting, it also makes your enterprise more visible. This can open you up to more threats and concerns legally. As you grow, make it a priority to protect your brand and your business strategy. Make sure your tax documents and revenue are 100% accurate so you don’t get hit with any sort of lawsuit. Get patents and trademark your intellectual property. And set up software programs that help keep hackers away from your information and customer data. It would be absolutely heartbreaking to see all your hard work and the growth of your enterprise taken away from you. When you love something, you protect it. In this case from any other software companies that may try and take away your intellectual property or your customers. This will also help with customer satisfaction because your clients will continue to see that you are a company that can be trusted and respected.