Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels
If you own a small business, the difficulty of handling fast growth might sound like the opposite of a problem. After all, growth is exactly what every business owner is hoping to experience. But growth can actually be detrimental to success if a business isn’t set up to handle it. Here are a few tips for ensuring your business is in the best position to handle swift growth.
1. Get the Right Tools
Rapid growth most likely means that your equipment, from your warehouse to your software, is most likely insufficient to handle the new volume of transactions. This is a good time to sit down and assess whether this level of growth is even healthy or sustainable for your business at this time. Perhaps you don’t have sufficient leadership in place to ensure that the growth is going to take your business where you want to go, or you lack the funds to grow sustainably. If you find yourself discovering that you may not be financially prepared to handle more business, it’s better to start reining in the growth now rather than flying by the seat of your pants.
If you are in a good position for rapid growth, however, it’s time to start assessing what you need to be successful. Sometimes it’s a new office building or more warehouse space, sometimes it’s good ransomware to keep your clients safe (what is ransomware?). It’s likely that your weak spots will be revealed over time, but doing a quick checklist now to prepare is going to take a big burden off of your shoulders.
2. Address Liquidity Issues
A common problem facing businesses that experience rapid growth is the difficulty of keeping track of liquidity. When you’re dealing with a large influx of customers and transactions, it can be surprisingly overwhelming to ensure that you’re in the green. Taking a good look at your accounts receivables and payables is an excellent first step when addressing rapid growth. For receivables, a checklist containing things like establishing clear payment terms, doing credit checks on clients, and being able to solve problems quickly will save you a lot of trouble down the road. Accounts payables need to be analyzed every so often to ensure that sales are resulting in revenue for each and every transaction.
3. Create a Strategy
For small businesses, it’s all too common for business plans and strategies to fall by the wayside. Maybe you never dreamed your business would grow this quickly, or you imagined that you’d have time to do all that later on. But there’s no better time than the present to create a growth strategy. This strategy should involve some level of market research and keeping up to date about your industry.
But it should also involve heavily questioning yourself about your original business goals. Will this growth take your business closer to where you want it to be, or is it taking you down a different path? Will you need to restructure your mission, vision, and values to fit with where your business is headed, or does the new trajectory fall in line with those core values? There’s no real right or wrong answer when asking those questions, but it’s important that you aren’t throwing away your goals for the sake of growth.
There’s a lot more to successfully handling rapid growth than these three tips, but they’re a good place to start when you’re feeling overwhelmed by success. Take the time to plan and prepare for growth, and your business will become stronger and more resilient with every growth spurt it experiences in the future.
4. Franchising the business
Franchising your growing business is one of the best ways to make your brand a well-known name and build a customer base nationally and internationally. If you are interested in finding out more about franchising your business visit this website called https://www.franchise-uk.co.uk which is a FREE resource of franchising information for anyone considering franchising or buying a franchise.