Growing your business is how you make it successful. Here are some tips to help you skyrocket your growth and success.
Successfully scaling your startup business into a long-lasting sustainable business is quite a challenge. During these “growing up” years, you’ll learn many surprising lessons and traverse many treacherous transitions that will make or break your business. Making it to the mid-cap point (earning $10 million – $1 billion in revenue) means you’ve made it to the “place to be.” This is because these organizations employ more people than small businesses or Fortune 500 companies do with over 200,000 mid-cap businesses employing 34% of the American workforce today. Getting here has been surprisingly tough ever since 2008’s recession. However, 82% of mid-cap businesses made it through this year while only 57% of small businesses survived. Big businesses didn’t do so well either – losing about 2,000 jobs per business while mid-cap companies added about 20 jobs per business.
Forbes says despite all this, many companies still find themselves acting like a large business that’s trapped in a mid-cap size “body.” It’s easy for them to grow past their capacity without growing up. They haven’t quite achieved their correct size because they’ve confused growth with scaling.
Growth: Adding revenue at the same pace as you add resources
Scaling: Adding revenue faster than you can afford to do so
This means you’re wasting a lot of time reinventing the wheel when it comes to conducting some of the most basic tasks
This is dangerous because you’re presuming that your business is stable when it’s not. This means you’re wasting a lot of time reinventing the wheel when it comes to conducting some of the most basic tasks. It also means that you’re conducting business in a chaotic realm, which can be fun for a while but eventually, this leads to so much bickering that you know “something” must change. The “something” is you. You must shift from working in your company to working on your company. Here’s how this will work…
Develop a Real Market Identity
There are many companies who produce financial plans and forecasts that list what they hope to accomplish throughout the coming year instead of stating how they’ll accomplish these goals. Sometimes these companies will even call their mission, vision, and values statements their “strategy.” Of course, these things are important, but they don’t sufficiently define the company’s real market identity. Another common mistake that frequently occurs here is allowing buyers to form your company’s identity.
There’s no good excuse to let any of this happen – not even the size of your business should deter you from conducting in-depth strategy work. Failure to do acknowledge this is actually an acceptance of your own demise. This is because during your early years is when you truly must focus on defining your market priorities so your business will remain focused. This is something that CRM like Copper can help you accomplish. It will help you:
- Identify your competitive positioning
- Analyze any threats that exist along the way
- Bring opportunities into focus
- Show you what your unique capabilities are
- Show you what your most important investments are and what you need to do to protect them
- Prioritize what work you need to do to advance your position in the marketplace
Build and Scale – Don’t Replicate
As a small company, you may be lucky enough to find early tailwinds – whether this is a market niche for a service or product that grows with your brand. When this happens it’s easy to keep repeating this or simply ride the wave as long as possible. This isn’t a good way to manage your company’s growth because it ignores the reality that the wave will eventually crest.
You need to be able to quickly multiply success while also building for sustainable growth. You don’t want your company’s growth to outpace its capacity to supply it. When this happens it’ll rip itself apart trying to keep up as it makes money. You need to stop this process for long enough to design a business that’s built on sustainable growth. This will set you apart from those who continue riding the wave until it finally crashes on them. It involves continually asking how your business should look before growth intensifies. Taking the time to do this will truly empower you while it’ll also benefit your business by giving you the opportunity to expand into other up and coming niches. By diversifying your company’s portfolio, mitigating longstanding risk, and capturing new markets that you’d have otherwise ignored, while still building your company, you can scale without replicating.
Welcome Standardization
While you may shudder when you hear the word “process,” this doesn’t mean you have to trade in the “entrepreneurial vibe” for corporate bureaucracy. You also don’t have to standardize your approaches to work in such a way that you do away with your entrepreneurial freedom. In fact, you can standardize processes in a way that liberates creativity and frees up distracted energy that’s been consumed by reinventing approaches every time something is done.
When your business grows, you don’t want to use band-aids to hold it together. While doing so is oftentimes very tempting, over time this will only lead to a mass of confusion, redundancies, and cost overruns. Instead, it’s in your best interest to prepare your business for growth with cohesive processes that promote creative freedom and define repeatable approaches to accomplishing your work. This way as size increases, your business grows more mature too. While this will take some time and energy to accomplish, don’t forget you have a team available to help you do so. By working together here you’ll save time and make more money in the future.
The only really good way to grow your startup business into a successful mid-cap business is through taking steps to effectively scale it. Doing so will allow you to enjoy greater results. In fact, 65% of mid-cap businesses that are growth-minded will also enjoy new markets – 61% of them will also find new opportunities in the international marketplace. When you position your business as a leader here, it’ll mature with the discipline it needs to be both strong and scalable – something that every business owner desires for their business.
