As your business grows, you'll inevitably experience growing pains—problems that arise from expanding too quickly or not being prepared for growth.
These can manifest in a number of ways, from issues with staffing and operations to difficulty scaling your business model.
While growing pains are a natural part of the growth process, there are a number of things you can do to mitigate their impact and ensure that your business continues to thrive.
By identifying problems and taking steps to prevent them (sometimes even before they happen), you can keep your business on track and poised for continued success, growth, and prosperity.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a list of 4 common business growing and how to fix them.
Let's dig in:
- Cash Flow
- Staff Woes
- Shifting Goals + Objectives
- Losing Track of Customers
Don’t Forget: An uptick in growth always presents new challenges, but with the right planning and execution, you can overcome them.
1. Cash Flow
When you're growing quickly, it's easy to get caught up in spending money on new inventory or hiring additional staff before you have the revenue to fully support it.
Of course, this can put a strain on your finances and make it difficult to meet your obligations.
To Help Solve It
- Find the Right Market: To sustain growth, it’s essential that you target a market that is large enough to support your expansion plans. Research your industry thoroughly so that you can identify potential areas of opportunity. Once you’ve zeroed in on a promising market segment, make sure you have a solid plan for reaching these customers effectively. Account-based Marketing (ABM) is a company-wide approach to ensuring that you can reach your target accounts through marketing and sales alignment.
- Pricing: Reevaluate your pricing strategy. Once you take a look at your competitors and objectively assess the value of what your business does, makes, or sells, you might discover that your ideal customer is happy to pay more for the value you offer them.
2. Staff Woes
As your business grows, so should your team. Luckily, businesses that grow also tend to attract top talent, which can further fuel expansion.
But to keep the valuable team you have and expand on it, you'll need to delegate more responsibilities and let go of some control over day-to-day operations.
This can be tough for entrepreneurs who are used to being hands-on in all aspects of their businesses.
But if you want to continue growing, you must learn how to trust other people to handle important tasks.
To Help Solve It
- Communication: Build a strong foundation of communication and mutual respect within your team by setting appropriate boundaries, expectations, and proactive plans for their development. Use communication tools like Slack to keep your team collaborating and sharing ideas.
- Delegation: Identify key players to whom you can delegate authority without hesitation.
- Expand Thoughtfully: Add new team members with the skills and experience necessary to help you scale. Look for individuals who share your vision and values and who have complementary skill sets. Hiring new team members who are aligned from the start with your company’s mission is the keystone to building and maintaining strong and vibrant company culture.
- Retention: Hold on to the brilliant team you have by making sure to take care of them with appropriate salaries, helpful benefits packages, and opportunities for learning, training, and development.
- Support: Work closely with project managers to ensure they know how best to support their teams during this time period of change within the organization.
3. Lack of clarity around goals and objectives
When businesses grow, they can sometimes lose sight of their original mission and values.
When that happens, confusion can ensue around every aspect of your business: staff, customers, sales, marketing, and more which could have serious consequences for your continued growth and success.
To Help Solve It
- Communication: Keep everyone aligned by regularly communicating the company's vision and setting clear goals that support it.
- Focus: Trying to accomplish too many things at once can also lead to confusion and frustration, so focus on a few key priorities at a time.
- Pivot: If your goals and objectives have changed, put together a team to identify and communicate the new mission and vision to your team.
4. Losing touch with customers
As your company grows, it’s important not to lose sight of what made you successful in the first place—an excellent customer experience. That’s what keeps the flywheel spinning to fuel new growth.
Growing businesses often enjoy increased brand recognition and customer loyalty, so it’s imperative that it remain a focus of your business.
To Help Solve It
- Consistency: Offer the same level of dedication to personal attention and care as when you were a smaller operation.
- Automate: HubSpot has tools to help your customers help themselves with easy-to-solve questions—like hours of operation, product lists, pricing, and more—so your customer experience team can focus on helping customers with issues that need a human touch.
- Communicate: Use social media to communicate with your customers where they are. That means discovering what two main channels your ideal customers frequent and sharing the information they need on a consistent basis. If you have a blog, become a thought leader by offering inbound content to your customers (this also works to generate more customers like the ones you already have).
Every successful business is bound to face growing pains at some point—from managing larger teams to expanding into new markets—which can be both exciting and challenging.
To make sure it’s more excitement than challenge, consider these few strategies to help overcome business growing pains and continue to scale your business successfully.
Curious about how Growth continues to help our clients grow their businesses over the long haul? Ask us. We’re right here.