Business Growing Pains - Getting Through The Tough Times

Published

August 30, 2021

When you’re growing your business, you can become fixated on growing your revenue that you might neglect the internal growing pains occurring at the same time.

Business Growing Pains - Getting Through The Tough Times

Seeing your business grow is one of the main sources of pride for an entrepreneur. However, the journey is never easy as you deal with business growing pains along the way. With every successful business story, there is a story of pain, suffering, struggle, and hard work. Your ability to rise above these struggles is the secret to taking your business to where you need it to be.

Common Business Growing Pains

As you work towards growing your business, you can become so fixated on growing your revenue that you might neglect the internal struggles that are occurring at the same time. You can expect to deal with a host of problems as you scale up your business. These are the things that you will face as you cope with the changing demands of your business.  

1. Hiring the Right People

The people who make up your team are the single most important element that will spell business success. Choosing the right people that fit the roles and responsibilities in your organization can make or break your expansion. Make sure you invest time in evaluating the people you choose to be a part of your team and that their skills and experience match their designated roles. You need to carefully vet your people since they will be the one to sustain your efforts in growing your business.

2. Maintaining Company Culture

The company culture is part of your brand identity. When you need to grow your business, you make a few internal changes to cope with the growing demand. One of the biggest challenges you must deal with is the risk of changing your company culture as you make this transition.

3. Lack of Communication

As you bring in more employees to meet the demands of your expanding business, you might suffer in terms of maintaining proper communication. It could be that your current system is not designed for a larger scope of employees. As a result, there might be gaps in terms of communicating essential aspects of your business’s daily operations.

4. No Clear Goals

Expanding your business and adding more employees to your team is not enough. You need to be able to clearly communicate your goals and the changes in steps you need to get there. You need to constantly reinforce this in order for everyone to be on the same page.

5. Remaining Competitive

One of the most common business growing pains is in terms of maintaining your competitive edge. This can be difficult to do when you have to think about scaling up your processes. This step can slow down your production, making it a challenge to stay competitive.  

How to Deal with Business Growing Pains

All businesses go through growing pains. With that in mind, you can address them and make the transition seamless with proper planning.  

Here are some strategies to help you get over the hump.

Four colleagues speaking in an office

Appraise Your Current Team

As mentioned above, hiring the right people is one of the major sources of business growing pains. In order to help you grow your team to meet your growing needs, it is important to assess your current team. Do you have the right skills and experience to cope with the growing demands of your business?

If not, then you need to specifically look into the skills and experience you need to cope with this scale of responsibility. The person/s you hire must also share your vision and passion for your business. They can be a valuable tool that you can use to get your business to the next level.  

You need to build a team that is able to carry you through the future as you continue to build your company.

Clearly Identify Your Goals

Lack of clarity with your goals can hurt your business as you expand. You need to write down and review your goals. What is your reason for expanding? Are you willing to go through the challenges in order to get where you want your business to be?  

You need to evaluate what is working and what is not with your current processes. This will enable you to identify the steps you must take to achieve your goals. Also, it is important to review your goals to ensure that they are realistic enough. This will give you accountability over your business and help you clearly map out the steps toward your goal.

Proper Delegation

Properly delegating roles to the members of your team is crucial in overcoming business growing pains. As a small business owner, you might feel the need to take on most of the responsibilities for running your business. But if you are scaling up, you need to get more people onboard and designate the roles correctly.

This is crucial in not only increasing productivity but also in ensuring that you get the job done right. As you grow your business, there will be more demands when it comes to managing your business. Working with the right people with the right skillset will facilitate a sustainable growth for your business.

Evaluate Your Processes

If you’re running a small business, it is easy to oversee your business processes as you can easily track your employees. But when you size up your business from 20 employees to 200, this can disrupt your processes. You need to plan for scalability and evaluate your processes, as well as what needs to change to ensure a seamless transition.  

You must also take note about the quality of production and the morale among your employees as your demand from them will mostly likely grow. Some of the essential processes that you need to evaluate include labor costs, product life cycle (from order to fulfillment), and automation, to name a few.  

Dealing with the business growing pains is understandably overwhelming for business owners. But it shouldn’t be the case when you plan correctly. Always evaluate every step of your business as you scale so you can be ready for any challenges that might arise. It is also important to be flexible enough so that you can devise the best solutions that bring efficiency and profitability.

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