In some ways, building a business is like building a bridge with Lego.
Lots of little pieces that add up to something very substantial but if you miss one piece, it all falls to bits.
In addition to the Lego challenges, building a business involves people, customers, suppliers, processes, and your money. So, it’s never usually linear or straight forward.
Here are 6 tips to save you some challenges and heartache before you embark on your successful path to growth.
- Nail down where your growth is coming from. New customers, or more from old? Create certainty in your pipeline. Understand your sales lead times by channels? Clarify precisely why customers are going to buy more? Develop confident marketing and sales plans and targets for the next 18 months.
- Understand and address all the skill and pressure implications for your team and yourself. Growth doesn’t happen by itself, you need to enable it. What new skills do you need to develop, how much extra support do individuals need and what additional leadership is needed where?
- Address the capacity pinch points in your organisation before they stop your growth. Where does growth impact most? How are you going to deal with that? How can you do that cost effectively or with least risk? What measures are in place to monitor and lead the change?
- Calculate and finance the additional cash and working capital you will need to run the business with more costs and more delayed income. Plan for bad debt with new customers if appropriate. Give yourself some wriggle room.
- Establish a service model and ethos to deal with customers when you don’t quite get it right, because you won’t get it right every time. What will you do when you are late, or something goes wrong? Thinking in advance will save you and your people, difficult situations and buy customer support and loyalty.
- Think ahead and act on your information. When you have established positive momentum and you are meeting your growth targets, you can implement next year’s marketing 3 months early to maintain momentum and build certainty of demand for next year. Make sure you provisionally budget for this.
Hope this helps and wishing you all the best!
Any challenges growing your business, get in touch
Keep it simple. Make progress.
#business growth #leadership
