When you’ve reached a point in your business where you feel it’s time to step things up and reach new levels of success, there are some big decisions you’ll need to make to ensure things go smoothly. Once the decision has been made to pursue growth for your company, it’s important to first clarify whether it’s truly the right time to do so or not.
As well as this, you’ll want to identify which methods you can employ to encourage that growth as naturally as possible, without overstretching your resources or your team. To help, we’ve put together our best tips that could increase your business’s success and growth.
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Secure Established Customers
One of the first steps you should take here is to actually make sure that your existing customers remain with you during this period of growth. To do so, it may be worth offering some extra bonuses and loyalty rewards to increase the chances that they’ll continue to provide your business with revenue during this time.
Growth may be a positive goal, but it can be tumultuous. The last thing you need is for people to start moving their attention towards your competitors when your overheads begin to rise as you hire new employees and spend on other things.
Identify And Reduce Risks
As well as current customers leaving, there are a number of other risks that you need to consider. While there are some risks that you just cannot influence and just have to accept, there are some that your decisions and planning can influence. For example, cyber security risks during periods of growth can increase as your new systems begin to be implemented.
Carelessness from you and your employees and a lack of experience in using new technology can lead to data being left vulnerable to theft. This data loss can impact you and your team, but it can also harm your customers, clients, and business partners’ loyalty and trust. Other risks include physical risks to staff too, and it’s wise to review your insurance policy as often as possible to make sure that you’re sufficiently covered for any accidents.
Prepare To Adapt
Adaptability is an essential part of running a business, and this is equally important during periods of stability as well as times of growth. New methods of working within your industry, or across society, in general, can lead to greater performance in your team, yet they often require a significant amount of thought and effort to put them into practice across your company.
However, failing to adapt to new ways of doing things can risk you being left by competitors, and this could seriously damage your business. Breed a culture of adaptability within your business to allow you and your team to experiment with new ways of handling tasks and switch back if things don’t work out.
Keep Track Of Performance
Monitoring your team’s performance is another essential step in maintaining productivity during the period of growth. As well as maintaining these levels, implementing a performance management system can actually increase your success and development too. This HR performance management software from Factorial allows you to generate reviews on the performance of your employees so that you can identify any areas that require improvement or employees that may need assistance. Having this sort of data to hand will improve your ability to make smart decisions based on your team, allowing you to keep a better eye on how well your business is functioning at all times. This innovative platform also allows you to conduct both qualitative and quantitative employee appraisals, which can help you gain great insights into your team.
Stick To Your Plan
While being able to adapt is important, you should still try to stick to your plans as much as possible. Adapting the way your business works and implementing new, unexpected ideas are great, but they shouldn’t influence your overall plans too much. Set goals and budgets, and be strict with yourself when following them. A quality, in-depth business plan will help you keep everything on track and help you deal with any potential hurdles that may appear.
When it comes to your budget, you should ensure that you have accounted for enough of this budget to handle the growth of your business, which will include new hires, new equipment, new software and networks, and potentially new premises as well. You’ll also need to make sure that you still have plenty of your budget set aside to keep your business running normally too. If you’re unable to grow your business without cutting costs in your current business model, that might be a red flag, suggesting that now isn’t the time to pursue that growth. Otherwise, you could increase the risk of stretching your resources too thin.
Improve Customer Services
As your business grows, theoretically, so should your customer base. And with that increased number of customers using your services or buying your products, there is an increased risk of customer complaints. If you then fail to keep up with any issues that customers are having, this could have a severe impact on the success of your business as those customers become disgruntled and head elsewhere.
Your customer services should be one of the many areas within your business that you put added focus into before attempting further growth. This may mean more customer service representatives working within your business, more outsourced services to handle this demand, or even the utilization of automation software if you haven’t done so already. This software can speed up the process of directing customers to the relevant departments and can also be used to provide basic FAQs and assistance via AI voice, email, and chatbot messages.
Develop Business Relationships
Strengthening your relations with other businesses, both within your industry and in others, may help in the long run. Refusing to work with others and trying to take on your business alone is only going to increase the chances of you struggling to handle certain situations in the future.
When you turn other business owners into partners and allies, you may benefit from the services they offer, whether as a one-to-one trade for your services or at a discount. Forming alliances can be great for your business for many reasons, and ensuring that you are always searching for new ways to improve your company is essential if you want growth to go ahead smoothly.
Focus On Marketing
Lastly, it’s important not to forget about the impact of quality marketing on the success of businesses, especially today. The world of marketing has continued to grow exponentially, with new avenues opening up to business owners all the time. There are very few reasonable times when putting effort and focus into your marketing isn’t going to be beneficial to your business, and sometimes stepping up those marketing efforts can be necessary. When you’re attempting to grow your business, a large part of that is going to be related to expanding your reach to new customers, either within your target demographic or even bringing in new demographics using different offerings.
This is going to rely heavily on your ability to promote and advertise your company, as well as individual services or products. Having access to an in-house marketing team is ideal here, especially for experts that can create content, manage your social media accounts, and engage with your audiences. Don’t let this important task fall by the wayside, or you might see your growth come to a screeching halt.
