Growing a business and scaling up can be equal parts exciting and overwhelming. Businesses often underestimate the intense pressure that accompanies rapid business growth. Besides if the growth comes too fast, your business can get the speed wobbles and go off track. To successfully scale your business you need to scale smart. This article will help you identify your growth bottlenecks, share advice on how to scale up effectively, and help you skyrocket your business growth.
Identify Growth Bottlenecks
The very first thing you need to do is analyze your business operations and identify the bottlenecks that may be holding you back from growth. Bottlenecks can lead to lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, poor-quality products or services, and stress for team members, so identifying and fixing them is vital.
Generally, business bottlenecks are found in two areas: people and processes.
People bottlenecks can start from within your leadership team or could be your staff. It’s important to identify where the bottleneck is. For example, the leadership team may be resistant to change. Or, your people in management may not have the skills to carry out the growth.
Maybe your sales team is holding you back. Or perhaps what’s lacking is the training and development. Your staff simply aren’t being trained to carry out their jobs effectively and help grow your business.
Review everything about your people objectively so you can get the lay of the land.
You may also have process bottlenecks holding you back from scaling your business the way you want. This could mean ineffective operational processes, in various areas such as sales, admin, customer service, IT, or even marketing. Ineffective processes could be holding your team back from being productive.
You will also need to review your systems and technology to make sure everything is up to scratch. You need reliable technology to be able to run your day-to-day business operations, projects, and processes and also to provide your business offering.
Once you have a better idea of what is holding you back, you can figure out how to move forward.
9 Tips for Handling Business Growth
The first and most important step towards scaling your business is to identify the barriers to your growth. Since you’ve already done this, let’s take a look at nine more tips to keep in mind when scaling your organization.
1. Align growth objectives with business goals
Your business is growing but do you know why you want to grow? Do you know how you’re going to grow effectively? Get a clear picture of your growth objectives then, make sure they’re in line with your overall business goals.
If your growth objectives don’t align with your business goals, you may need to rethink your growth. Setting goals and aligning growth with those goals will help focus your business’s resources more effectively.
2. Create a growth strategy
Once you have a clear idea of your goals and objectives, you need to create a growth strategy for your business. A plan to follow.
Depending on your business, your growth strategy could include plans for expanded product offerings, new locations, customer acquisition, selling products on new platforms, growth in employees, franchising, and more.
3. Maintain cash flow and liquidity
Cash and capital liquidity are essential for scaling your business. Start by making sure you have enough to cover your business’s short-term needs. You may need to examine accounts receivables, manage account payables, implement inventory best practices, and timely invoicing to better manage cash flow. Beyond this, you may also need to raise capital to finance your planned growth. C
4. Create realistic forecasts
Forecast your resource requirements. Analyze your current resources such as cash, staff, equipment, time, etc, and use your growth strategy to forecast how much more of these resources you’re likely to need in this new phase of business growth. Having a clear picture of your resource needs will help you to plan better and continue growing without getting stuck.
A tool like Mission Control can help you forecast your resources better. Manage your growth project within the software, and by having all your information in one hub, the process of forecasting becomes much more streamlined and effective.
5. Hire the right people
If people are your growth bottleneck, you need to hire the right people to keep your business moving in the right direction. Hire people who are not only skilled but also have a growth mindset and are committed to the job.
They should be focused on growth and actively look for ways to make their own jobs easier, reduce repetitive tasks, and turn complex tasks into processes that can be performed by anyone.
6. Build systems that scale
An important reason to identify your process bottlenecks is also so that you can make them better. Usually, this means optimizing many of your current operations and creating a better system that will scale as your business scales.
Systematizing your business with formal, organized processes not only helps you focus on strategy and growth, it also makes your business more valuable should you ever try to sell it in the future.
7. Automate where possible
After creating better systems, the next step is to automate tedious, manual tasks and processes wherever possible. The best way to do this is to leverage software and technology that will help you get more work done, in less time.
You can automate customer service tasks, sales processes, invoicing, customer relationship management tasks and so much more. Automation saves you time and makes better use of your resources, especially human resources in the long term.
8. Stay focused, don’t multitask
When business is growing, it can be tempting to try and do everything at once. Don’t. This is where your train can go off the rails and come to a grinding halt.
If you try to do too many things, you fail to do any of them well. Trying to move in too many directions is almost always a recipe for disaster and it certainly won’t help you scale.Take a structured approach to your growth and business in general. This will help you plan your workload, reduce emergencies and systematize your entire approach to growth.
In short, stay focused on the activities that drive growth. Don’t get distracted and don’t try to multitask with tasks and projects that don’t move the needle and take away from the overall goals.
9. Ensure growth is sustainable
Finally, at every stage, take actions that help you ensure your business growth is sustainable in the long run. Don’t try to do too much too quickly. Be patient.
A strategic approach to growth may feel like you’re slowing things down but it’s actually the most sustainable way to scale. Always keep an eye on your overall goal and stick to your growth strategy. This leads to growth that is continuous and sustainable in the long term.
Remember, slow and steady wins the race.
Invest in the Right Platforms to Grow Better, Scale Faster
As we mentioned at the beginning, scaling a business can be exciting and overwhelming at the same time. But you don’t have to do it alone.
With the right platform by your side, you can streamline the process and grow your business in a sustainable way.
A project management tool like Mission Control can help you do everything from start to finish. You can identify your bottlenecks, set your goals, create forecasts, automate processes and basically, manage the entire growth process in one centralized location.
Request a demo today to see how Mission Control can help you take control of the speed wobbles and stay on track for business growth.
