Why You Need to Plan Your Business Growth
Growing a new company is one of the most important steps in transforming a startup into a sustainable enterprise. You need to prepare for the expansion of your firm in light of the shifting economic conditions, your personal objectives, and the unexpected twists and turns that may arise.
For the past twenty years, Brad Krauskopf has been the sole proprietor of his several enterprises. Since 2011, his primary attention has been on the establishment of Hub Australia and the management of its expansion.
As CEO, Brad has overseen Hub Australia’s expansion and development, during which time the company has applied the lessons learned at each new coworking location to enhance its operations and increase its scale.
With more than 3,500 members spread across its seven sites, Hub Australia has established itself as one of the leading Australian-owned coworking providers.
The documentation of processes, the mapping out of the road to each level of scaling, and the establishment of the appropriate corporate culture are all key resources that must be compiled before you can feel confident in your strategy for the expansion of your organisation.
Scaling your team:
Those who are just starting out in business or who operate a small company frequently make the mistake of trying to handle all of the work alone rather than looking to hire more staff.
This could be because of the costs involved, the amount of time it takes to recruit and train new employees, or the mentality that “if you want something done well, do it yourself.”
It is crucial for a company that wants to become self-sufficient to put together a capable team that can carry out the necessary tasks and guarantee that everything is operating as it should.
It is crucial to focus on people’s power, processes, and resources when hiring a new team. Hiring specialists is frequently more successful than potentially mismanaging things internally.
Accounting and legal must-haves:
It is imperative that you initiate conversations with advisers early on in the startup phase if you plan on expanding your company with the help of outside investors.
As money becomes more of a focus, failing to get professional assistance and making adequate plans puts you at risk of missing out on government handouts, being made to pay penalties, and leaving yourself vulnerable to legal troubles.
One of the most typical blunders made by founders is not having a formal agreement in place prior to the company’s establishment. It is absolutely necessary to discuss shareholding structure, roles, milestones, and exit possibilities right from the start of the business.
Growing too quickly:
Many businesses have the goal of becoming competitive on a global scale or expanding rapidly, but the process of entering new markets can be time-consuming and expensive.
Before you can successfully grow your business abroad, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the relevant rules and regulations, in addition to a track record of proven success, in order to be confident that your product will be successful in the new market and space.
Growing more quickly than you are prepared for puts you in danger of being strained financially and resource-wise. Rapid expansion can be a concern if you do not have growth plans and a method to follow in the event that it occurs, so it is important to prepare for it.
In order to prepare your companies for the expansion of their operations in the future, you may require legal and financial assistance and a framework, in addition to the development of fallbacks and protections.
Tips for improving your business
You, as the owner of a business, are presumably aware of the areas in which your company has room for improvement. When owners of businesses desire to make improvements to their companies, they aren’t always sure where to start.
The following is an outline of some important measures that you may take to get started developing your company.
Assess your situation
It is important to make sure that you have a comprehensive understanding of the aspects that are affecting the performance of your organisation before you begin making any adjustments.
These may include the current business methods you employ, the trends in the relevant market, or shifts in the larger environment in which you function.
The following are some tools that can assist you in evaluating the current state of your company:
SWOT-analysis – assists you in determining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and dangers facing your company.
Benchmarking – lets you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks that face your firm.
Market research – studies the market and industry in which your company operates to discover patterns, shifts, and requests made by customers or clients.
Trend analysis – employs business data gathered over the course of time to establish patterns of consistent results or trends.
Webinars (web-based seminars) – offer you useful information that will assist in the development of your business skills.
Set clear goals
You have the ability to make your company’s goals as general or as specific as you see fit. Putting your objectives into words that are easy to understand will make it much simpler for you to achieve them. Check to see that your aims are:
- specific – Make it perfectly clear what it is that you intend to accomplish.
- measurable – Make sure you have a way to measure the results of the endeavour.
- achievable – Make sure your goal is something you can achieve given the amount of time and money you have.
- relevant – Be sure that your goals will lead to an increase in profit drivers and will improve some aspect of your company.
- timely – Determine a definite end date for the project.
After you have your goals written out, you should rank them in order of importance to choose which ones you should work on first.
It’s possible that some of our objectives need to take precedence over others. It is essential that you recognise the need to handle certain plans with a long-term strategy since you will not be able to fulfil them immediately due to a lack of resources, cash, or time. It is also essential that you recognise the need to address certain plans with a short-term strategy.
Identify strategies for achieving your goals.
Go over your objectives, then make a list of the things that you believe are contributing to the way things are right now. Consider the several courses of action you could take to make the situation better.
You might want to think about hiring the services of a business professional, such as a professional trainer, a contractor, or a business adviser, depending on the objectives that you’re attempting to accomplish with your company.
Think about the things that you are capable of doing on your own and the areas in which you would benefit from some support.
Develop a plan for implementing your strategies
You need to figure out how to put your strategies into action in order to accomplish what you set out to do. Strategies often consist of a number of distinct acts or responsibilities. It is in your best interest to work out the specifics of how you want to carry out these steps.
Create your strategy using a format that is most comfortable for you. It should include the following:
- a time frame – how much time it will take to accomplish a task in addition to the beginning and ending dates
- actions – describe each every stage in as much detail as you possibly can.
- responsibilities – assign responsibility for each individual action, ensuring that everyone is aware of exactly what is expected of them and who is accountable for ensuring that the work is completed.
- resources – the budget, staff, and supplies required to finish each action should be listed.
- a desired outcome –indicate how you will determine that the action has been finished successfully.
When you have finished developing your plan, you should consider revising your overall business strategy as well.
Measure the results
Checking to see if you’ve finished an activity might be a straightforward way to choose how you will evaluate the success of your efforts to reach the results you have set for yourself.
When you have more ambitious objectives, you may need to devise a method of evaluation that is more intricate, such as boosting profits by a predetermined percentage or acquiring a specific number of new customers. When working towards these kinds of objectives, assigning points as a means of monitoring your progress and gauging your level of achievement can be another useful strategy. This will assist you in sticking to your plan and achieving your goals.
Take into consideration how frequently you wish to evaluate the success of your firm. This might also assist you in regularly setting new goals for yourself.
Four leadership tips to help you sustain business growth
How do you keep your company growing when even the most promising new businesses tend to stall after only a few years in operation? According to an article written by Sabri Suby, founder of King Kong, Australia’s fastest-growing digital agency, good leadership entails investing in your team as well as yourself in order to assist the business succeed.
Invest in your people
There has never been an instance of a single individual accomplishing much on their own, and the sooner you acknowledge this fact and invest in good people, the better off you will be. When I first began work on King Kong, I worked out of my home with only a laptop and a phone. As soon as I realised that I couldn’t continue to expand it by myself past a certain point, I turned my attention to putting together my staff and the infrastructure of the company. When you surround yourself with good people, they make it easier for you to seize any opportunity that comes your way.
When I hire, I look at attitude. The talents listed on a CV only go so far, and businesses are missing out on a lot of talent because they base their hiring decisions on skills that can only be acquired through additional training or experience. It is better to locate someone with a can-do attitude who is not afraid of hard labour and train them up rather than looking for someone else to perform the work.
Putting money into your team should consist of more than just investing in its training. If your employees are going to be spending more than 40 hours a week working for you and with each other, you owe it to them to make the experience enjoyable. When you bring talented people on board, make sure to take care of them and give them a cause to smile every day they come to work.
A significant number of companies adhere to the maxim “your customers come first.” When you move past the stage of starting a business, the mantra that should guide your actions should be “put your team first,” because this is the component that you can manage effectively at scale. Because they are the ones who will be dealing directly with the clients, your team is the single most crucial aspect to do correctly.
Value yourself
When you first launch a company, you have to get used to handling everything on your own. You have to get out of this mindset if you want your business to flourish and if you want to develop as a leader. Acquaint yourself with the discomfort of identifying your own strengths and limitations, as well as the gaps in your skill set, because once you are aware of your shortcomings, you can try to erase them.
The secret to King Kong’s sustainable growth has been letting go of day-to-day operations and recruiting a management team of world-class calibre to handle those responsibilities.
Learn how to justify the use of your time as part of this process. You should schedule a few hours each day for your team to meet with you, so that they can reach you when they need to, but they won’t be able to disturb you while you’re in the zone. If you have an executive assistant or a scheduling app, rather than leaving the door open, have your team request a chat using one of those channels rather than leaving the door open metaphorically.
Strive for productivity
You’re probably familiar with the Pareto principle, also known as the ’80/20 rule,’ which states that 20 per cent of activities are responsible for 80 per cent of revenue. Following an investigation of King Kong, I came to the conclusion that just 4 per cent of my efforts may be responsible for producing 64 per cent of our total earnings.
I zero in on that, and the rest is handled by the talented members of my team.
Planning is an investment I make on a personal level because I know that every minute I spend planning will save me time in the long run. You should break your overall objective down into monthly, weekly, and daily targets in order to devise a strategy for achieving it. Beginning each day with a plan will give you the momentum you need to be productive.
Take risks
If you wait until you have 100 per cent of the facts before making a decision in business, you will never make a decision.
Great leaders are skilled risk-takers who are able to quickly analyse the potential benefits and drawbacks of 30–40 per cent of their decisions so that they may take calculated risks. Being decisive enables one to seize opportunities, which in turn allows one to stay ahead of the competition.
If you haven’t built a solid basis for your company, you can’t expect your expansion to be sustainable. If you want to go from being a single entrepreneur to being the leader of a much larger team, you need to hire the proper people so that you are supported by a culture and set of abilities that allow you to expand.
This provides you with the breathing room to become a productive and effective leader, allowing you to seize opportunities as they present themselves and propel your company forwards.
How to drive business growth in 2021
The movie “The Matrix” presented us with a reality that was beyond our wildest imaginings, and in the year 2020, COVID-19 did the same thing. In the following video, successful entrepreneur and business leader Melanie Power discusses the guidance she gives to her global network of accounting professionals and company owners of small companies on how to best navigate this new digitally-driven environment.
Who else, in addition to me, is sick and tired of hearing about “unusual times” and “pivots”? And yet, it seems to be the most accurate representation of the things we go through on a daily basis in many respects.
The effects of COVID-19 on micro and small enterprises have been extremely significant. The cumulative effect is much more important when independent enterprises make up a sizeable portion of the economy in Australia and New Zealand, as they do in both countries.
Over the course of the past several months, I have collaborated extremely closely with accounting professionals from around the world as well as from my own neighbourhood in order to navigate this unwelcome reality and gain a better understanding of the multiple issues they confront.
In particular, a lot of people, the majority of which run their own small enterprises, are having trouble overcoming the obstacle of bringing their organisations online for the very first time. For some, it’s like entering an entirely new planet.
What struck me was the sheer magnitude of the changes that small firms are having to deal with presently. The experience of going through COVID-19 has been described by many as being comparable to that of first viewing The Matrix. Morpheus tells Neo in the movie The Matrix that many people just aren’t ready to witness the Matrix because it is a reality that is so drastically different from the one they are used to and comfortable with. This explanation is for those who have not watched the film.
When I first moved my business online many years ago, I went through exactly the same process, so I can speak authoritatively on the subject. I was able to build my firm to serve 120 customers without ever resorting to paid advertising thanks to my dogged determination, the opportunity to learn from my mistakes and sheer good fortune. As a result, I am now in a position to command the value that is rightfully mine. My company of training and coaching accountants and bookkeeping professionals to control the price they deserve to charge their clients has grown to several millions of dollars at this point.
If you’re a small business feeling the same, here are a few things I learnt along the way:
Be clear about what you stand for
Taking your company online can be an efficient and cost-effective approach to bringing in new consumers and maintaining communication with the ones you already have. Clients want to know how you are going to help them, and they may become confused if they are offered a multitude of services that are beyond their understanding. I see so many websites that offer a comprehensive range of services, but they litter the page with industry jargon that a small business owner is unlikely to understand.
Focus on what it is that you can contribute, and add your perspective to it. It is important to be clear about who you are and what you believe in.
Identify who you want to work with
When you have determined what you stand for, it will be much simpler for you to specify the kinds of people with whom you want to collaborate. Working with customers who do not respect them or who place little value on what they have to provide is a frustrating experience for anyone. If you have a clear idea of who your ideal customer is, it will be much simpler for you to bring in new customers via the internet. This is because you will be able to more precisely create and explain your offering in your marketing.
You run the danger of being overly general, wasting important time on customers who aren’t a good fit for your company, and spreading yourself too thin if you attempt to cater to everyone’s needs at the same time.
Take a systematic marketing approach.
You need to have a system and procedure in place in order to produce new client leads, just as you would if you were providing service to an existing customer. Try to avoid being haphazard and assuming that a single appearance at a networking event or a single post on LinkedIn would result in new business. There is a good probability that it will not happen.
It takes time to market to prospective clients, and if you have a strategy in place, you will be able to take suggestions #1 and #2 and utilise them to develop material that is intelligent and considered, which will bring you more clients that you want to work with.
To summarise, the following are some ways that you can simplify and speed up the process of demonstrating your value to existing and potential clients:
- Knowing who you want to speak to
- How to get in front of them
- What to say
- Why you are saying it
In the meantime, it is absolutely necessary to avoid forgetting the fundamentals of running a business, as doing so is what will ensure the continued success of your enterprise as it expands. Cash flow is still the most important aspect of any business, and tools like cloud solutions can give you visibility to help you keep track of both your spending and your income so that you can make educated decisions about your finances.
Having a website isn’t enough to make your transition to the online world successful. By applying this logic to the manner that you advertise and communicate online – while maintaining focus on your core financials in the background – you will save time and money while also increasing the likelihood of your business flourishing during these challenging times. Begin with the fundamentals, and everything else will fall into place from there.