How to get used to your growth

Your business has grown more than you were ever expecting. Your ambition and hard work have paid dividends. The doubters are wrong and you’re busier than you’ve ever been.

But there’s one small problem: you’re busier than you’ve ever been. You’re trying to craft a 25^th hour out of each day to get everything done. How can you adjust from successfully working on your own to managing a team capable of delivering the next stage of your commercial growth?

This article will offer a few tips for overcoming those early growth challenges. Hopefully it will help you to focus more on your vision for the future and less on paperwork piling up on your desk.

Keep extending your client profile

As you’re growing your business, you’ll develop long-term relationships with your clients. It’s inevitable. However, it’s vitally important to prioritise the development of relationships with multiple clients over dependency on just a few. So many businesses devote all their marketing resources to developing just a few relationships. If they lose one of those accounts, they’re left with a massive revenue hole to fill.

The stress of this sudden and unexpected drop in sales together with the ensuing cash flow crisis can stop growth plans in their tracks. By spreading your turnover across multiple accounts, you can protect your cash flow against the loss of a key client.

Know your people

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses – including you. You want to make sure that everyone in your business is doing what they do best. But letting go is tough.

Many entrepreneurs struggle to relinquish any control over parts of their businesses. They’ve built them up from scratch. The idea of leaving somebody else to look after their marketing strategy, for example, feels like leaving a stranger to pet sit their puppy.

These feelings are completely understandable. After all, your business started as a dream. It has grown into a lucrative reality because of your grit and determination.

None of us entrepreneurs are invincible though. Trying to continue doing absolutely everything yourself will just make you more stressed, without seeing any reward in your annual profits. Focus on the things that you do better than anyone else. Then trust your colleagues to do their jobs outstandingly. The result is a happy, fulfilled and accountable team – and a healthy balance sheet.

Build a great culture

Create a workplace that your team loves walking (or logging) into every day. Provide ongoing and discreet support with both physical and mental health. Focus on the quality of colleagues’ work, not whether one of them needs to take an afternoon off to spend some quality time with their kids. Most importantly, let your staff know how grateful you are for their efforts and their talents whenever you speak to them. Your accountant will thank you at the end of the year.

Put great systems in place

If you’ve been watching any TV news lately, you’ve probably seen more than one piece about the importance of everyone following the same rules at work. In any business, accusations of favouritism or preferential treatment are toxic to growth forecasts.

You want to put clear processes in place, so that everyone knows what tasks they are responsible for and the performance levels that they need to maintain.

This can be significantly harder than it sounds.

When you first started your business, you made all the decisions. If something was bought, you bought it. If something was sold, you made that sale.

As your business grows, life gets more complex. Hence, it’s important to base all decisions on procedures that your whole team have easy and regular access to, without reliance on your personal intervention or decision – making. Instead, they will be based on impartial and transparent company policy.

By getting growth right, you can give your business real longevity. It’s not an easy process, but everything will be worth it when you’ve got (or sold) your huge business in 20 years’ time (or maybe a lot sooner!). Hopefully, these tips will help you along the way.