Maintaining quality: a growing challenge

Delivering more products or services to serve an ever-growing audience is what business is about. But as the volume of output increases, quality, and customer care can drop – and there’s no quicker way to lose hard-won customers.

At this stage, it is crucial to:

• Establish clear quality standards across the business
• Invest in the right staff at the right time, through flexible resourcing models, training, and development.
• Monitor customer feedback, and actioning it through relevant, timely, management information
• Engage closely with suppliers and partners to close quality gaps
• Streamline operations through better systems, integration, and automation, to maintain service quality.

Financial management and planning 

Whatever stage your business is at, knowing the numbers – and planning to get them to where they need to be – is key.

But as your business starts to grow, the complexity of Finance and the financial management processes will inevitably increase, as will the risk and lost opportunities associated with failing to manage them properly.

Ensure your finances are in order by carefully reviewing:

• Investment opportunities: where will your money bring the greatest return, for the least risk?
• Debt management: do you have the right debt type available and enough to allow for the typical growth challenge of paying out before your customers pay you?
• Aligning business goals with the finances, to ensure objectives are adequately funded.
• Staying on top of the overall finance picture, through profitability analysis, cash flow and working capital management, resources, etc.

In a growing business, the financials tell a critical but often complicated story – Understanding these figures is key to making informed decisions that benefit the business.

Upping your customer acquisition and retention

With growth comes a more pressing need to understand customers, revenues, and profitability, so all three can be optimised and combined efficiently for maximum effect.

Efficiency is key, as the more your business grows, the more the inefficiencies in its operations and performance will cause hidden costs and issues that begin to affect its ability to win, satisfy, and keep customers profitably.

How can you improve your customer acquisition and retention:

• Target the right customers with the right proposition at the right price point.
• Increase cost-effectiveness through better systems, processes, integration, and automation.
• Optimise profit-volume, so profit from the right products and services and target customers becomes more sustainable and delivers better lifetime value.
• Build brand loyalty and advocacy amongst customers, to build in resilience against market fluctuation.

Customer acquisition and retention enter a much more complex phase when you start to grow- Simplifying processes is crucial for sustainable growth.

Adapting to change

Change is a constant in business, but when your business begins to grow, it can ramp up, and trying to grapple with it all on your own isn’t an effective use of your time.

As your business enters more dealings with more customers and with more staff, its risk profile will naturally change, and managing that growing risk will become more pressing. 

At the same time, technology will move on (it always does), customers’ expectations of your products and services will change, and the market itself will shift and challenge you to remain relevant to it.

As a business owner, navigate the challenges of adapting to change:

• Measure and manage changing risk proactively through relevant, timely, and accurate management information
• Embrace technology to increase efficiency, through better systems, integration, and automation
• Understand customers’ changing behaviours through monitoring and market research
• Stay current with the market by understanding the competitors and how to counter them

No business will grow if it doesn’t adapt – but make sure adaptation doesn’t put a brake on business growth.

Leadership – developing a growth mindset.

A growing business needs strong leadership to take it forward, but this is a very different mindset from the start-up culture you’re likely to be more familiar with - and you need to be sure you have the right people and leadership structures in place to make the transition.

A growing business needs a competent leadership team that can positively impact employees, as more and more of these come on board, and lead by example.

As a business owner, you should be able to have:

• A growth mindset, to seek out new challenges and accept failure as part of the growth  process
• A smart growth strategy, based on intelligence, analysis, and adaptability
• Additional talent into the team as and when required, cost-effectively.

Leadership, growth, and success go together – as a business starts to grow it is crucial to understand the direction in which the business is heading.