Business Growth Demands Shifts in Strategy

As an owner of a small business, there are a whole lot of issues that you have to confront every day. Besides the normal issues, there are always situations that pop up without warning. When your business is small and more easily manageable, they are easier to steer one way or another When your business starts growing rapidly, however, turning things around can get more difficult. This can turn into roadblocks to progress. Today, we will look at some of the issues that a small business owner will encounter when their business grows fast.

How Big Is Your Business?

Entrepreneurs have a tendency to look to other business owners to find what works and what doesn’t. Of course, your business functions independently and will react its own way to any solutions you enact for its problems. Once you get to a point where your business has moved out of the tinkering stage and you’ve figured out the best way to move forward, you should have a pretty good idea about what to expect. With such a high percentage of businesses failing before they can see any substantial growth--or because of prematurely investing in your business’ growth--it is important to know where your revenue is coming from and how to forecast its continued expansion.

For the small business owner, this takes more than working in your business. It takes working on your business. Unfortunately, it is a luxury few small business owners have time for. That’s why you have to make time to do it and begin to delegate responsibilities early. That way you can spend more time making sure that your business is moving in the right direction rather than doing things that keep you from doing so. 

How IT Fits In

IT plays a huge role for small businesses, but as a business grows, it becomes even more imperative. This is because IT presents solutions to solve operational inefficiencies. All businesses feed off of their ability to produce goods and fulfill services in a timely manner. The more IT a business comes to depend on, however, the more IT your business will likely demand.  

Small businesses may start out with a server or two, but as it grows into a medium-sized company, the infrastructure demand will grow rapidly. That’s not to say that there will be a huge shift in the way that you use your IT as you grow. Most medium-sized businesses still utilize the same technology, just on a much, much larger scale. 

Management of Growth

Some entrepreneurs have a difficult time when their role shifts from team leadership to company leadership. In fact, many businesses see a plateau in growth due to a reluctance to innovate and properly delegate responsibilities. The fact is that once your business gets to a certain point, your main value should be leadership, not proficiency at completing role-specific tasks. In fact, if you are too involved in the day-to-day running of your business, and you have hundreds or even thousands of subordinates, things can get pretty dicey. It can even stall a business at a time when it should be advancing and looking to break into new markets and diversify its revenue streams.

The ability to hire people with complementary skills--and to trust those hires to do good by you--is an important part of business growth. Sad to say that most entrepreneurs favor hiring people that are like them, but the most successful companies work because they have the different perspectives needed to create products and services that people want, fulfil those roles efficiently, and know how to move business forward.

Lean on Outside Experts

Sometimes, when your business gets to the point where it isn’t functioning as a small business anymore, the best thing to do is to scale up or back. The easiest way to accomplish this is through outsourcing. There are people in all manners of work that you can lean on to do a job that you wouldn’t need a full-time employee for. These services typically come with favorable financial terms and can be contracted until they complete a job and then let go when they are no longer needed without the problems that accompany turnover in human resources.

At Washington Works, we work with small and medium-sized businesses as an outsourced company, and we believe that we provide substantial value through our managed IT services platform. If you would like to talk to one of our consultants about getting what you need to keep your business moving forward, call us today at 301-571-5040.