Small business owners have to deal with a host of issues every day. Some are routine but new things that have to be managed also crop up out of the blue. Especially when a business is smaller, these issues are usually easy to accommodate, but when a business is expanding it can all get a whole lot more complicated. If you don’t want the progress you’ve worked so hard to achieve to stall, you need to be alert. So let’s look at some of the things that small business owners often face when their business is growing.
The Size of Your Business
One thing that entrepreneurs do is to see what works best for other businesses. All businesses are different, of course, each with its own unique challenges to manage. When you’re up and running and ready to keep moving forward, you’ll have a good idea of where you are, what’s working and what bumps in the road you can expect to face along the way. One of the things small business owners need to be on top of is knowing where their principal revenue is coming from and how to keep the income stream growing.
To achieve growth, it’s about more than working in your business. It’s about working on your business, to make it the most efficient it can be. The bad news is that a lot of small business owners don’t have the time to do this. The solution? You have to make the time, and one way to do that is learning how to delegate responsibilities.
Tech We Can Help
Most businesses make some us of IT, and it’s even more vital for growing businesses to make the most of what IT systems can provide to boost efficiency and productivity. Businesses depend on producing goods and providing services in a timely fashion. Your IT use is likely to grow exponentially, because the more you use it, the more you may need.
You may start off with one or two servers – but then, as you grow into a medium-sized business, your infrastructure needs to expand too. You won’t have to overhaul or replace your whole IT system but you may have to scale it up substantially to meet the demands of a larger operation.
How to Manage Growth
The entrepreneur’s role shifts when a business expands. What started out as leading a team turns into leading a company, which is a much more complicated organism. This can be the point where company performance and growth reach a plateau. The problem is that this is the stage where you need to delegate responsibilities and work on innovations. The focus isn’t being proficient at completing role-specific tasks. It’s leadership on a bigger scale. At this moment in the business trajectory, owners need to lead, and they can’t do that effectively if they’re too involved in the small details of day-to-day business operations.
To reach new markets and diversify income streams you need to go up a gear. Hiring people with the right skills, who you can delegate to and trust to oversee the different areas of your business, is crucial to growth. It’s not just about cloning yourself. You’ll probably need people with different perspectives to you, so you can create a dynamic and productive environment that’s conducive to maintaining growth.
Lean on Experts from Outside
If your business has passed the small business stage and you need to scale up, then outsourcing some aspects of your operations can be the easiest and most effective way to go. All sorts of tasks can be outsourced, eliminating the need to delegate tasks to your existing staff or taking on additional full-time employees. Some can be contracted on a short-term and occasional basis, job by job, and on favorable financial terms. Not all work is suitable for outsourcing, of course. It will depend on the specifics of your company’s operations. But when it’s possible, it can be a huge time, money and resource saver.
At Quikteks we work with small and medium-sized businesses as an outsourced company. We believe our managed IT services provide substantial value to our clients. If you’d like to consult with one of our IT professionals about how we can help you keep your business moving forward, reach out to us today at (973) 882-4644.