6 Strategies For Handling Fast Company Growth
When companies experience rapid acceleration, it can be both an exciting time and one that is also fraught with challenges. Fast growth comes with a continuous uptick beyond what is normal for others in your industry, and it will last longer than a temporary or seasonal spike in traffic or sales.
Here are some tips for handling skyrocketing success!
1. Evaluate What Is Causing Growth
Examine the causes behind the explosive expansion and see if it results from a well-planned approach to draw in customers.
Focus on the pieces that are working, so you can replicate these tactics to launch you to even greater heights while working to eliminate tasks that are less effective. This is your first task as it is important to first understand what is causing these results and build on that once your success is managed correctly.
2. Make Customer Support Your Top Priority
At this stage, your clients will form long-lasting impressions of you based on how they are treated.
Their experiences need to be top-notch, so ensure that a superior product or performance is delivered and that patrons receive a quick and effective remedy when there are problems to ensure more growth in the future.
Often, this aspect tends to be neglected and overlooked when market demand increases.
With more revenue coming in, you might want to consider growing your team as well to keep up with the fast growth and high demands.
3. Examine Your Growth Objectives
Every business will have a goal for where it wants to go, and it’s imperative to take time to determine what the ultimate aim is. For some organizations, it will be to become profitable, and for others, it may be to make the greatest amount of difference or impact in the world. Others still may decide it is a combination of the two, and they should establish clear, measurable markers for each firm to help them identify where they are in their journey. These objectives are better identified as a direct translation of business goals from the growth strategy.
Objectives help guide decision making so a firm can reduce the gap between the forecasts of profit contribution and markets from the overall objectives.
Among this strategy it’s important to create clear goals and measure the outcome after a set period of time. BrainBalfour recommends setting yearly growth goals for your business as it continues to grow.
Here our his top 5 tips:
1. Your growth model should inform your goals
2. Define the order of operations to reach your goals
3. Focus on strategies; don‘t get distracted by tactics
4. Assess Your Acquisition Portfolio
5. Gut-check your goals “Above, Below and Across”
Read the entire article here.
4. Create a Strategy
It is often very helpful to start where you want to end up and work backwards, you can do this by developing a model for how the business should operate. Creating a business plan is also a must for projecting where clients will come from, ensuring a continuation of your revenue and prediction of growth.
When creating a strategy consider the following:
Maintaining your role: If you are fulfilling orders, working as customer service or working the front lines of the company, you won‘t be able to continue this much longer with expected growth. Consider when you should hire more employees, possible promotions and new positions to help with expected growth.
Staying organized: With more growth comes more chaos if you aren't ready for it. Make sure you have an organizational system in place or procedures for when business gets going.
Create service quality control standards to ensure a consistent quality. Once you found the best organization strategy, bring your team on board so there are no holes in your communication to avoid misunderstandings and disarray.
5. Forecast Your Budget
Intense scaling will probably require the hiring of more staff, and it will need to coincide with more money earned from sales. In addition, it may be necessary to occupy more space to properly respond to the growing demands. Along with your growth strategy, start documenting the projected expenses and expected income to create a plan for managing money as well.
Smartsheet has all the best FREE business budget templates for any company wanting to create a budget management plan. Their spreadsheets are easy to download, and include options like tracking revenue, expenses, cash flow, unnecessary spending, future growth projections, required purchases, positive impacts and so much more.
6. Control Costs
The price of production can go up as you scale, giving you a reason to work with vendors who offer bulk prices or who will give discounts for partnering with them, offsetting your costs with your growth! Resist the urge to take out high-interest loans and try to trim unnecessary spending where possible. To do this you need to carefully allocate money by doing research to stretch each dollar.
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