All businesses want to grow, but there is a right and wrong way to do it. Growing too fast means spreading your resources too thin, and waiting too long means letting perfect opportunities to grow your audience and your revenue pass by. Knowing how to scale your business is vital – we identify the most common business scaling mistakes below and give you some tips on how to avoid them.
Undervaluing Customer Loyalty
All businesses fail without customers, and companies are always trying to reach a larger audience. But from a business perspective, not all customers have equal value.
It’s easy to forget this and focus all your effort on short-term growth, and too many businesses do. This approach leads to high turnover rates, where customers buy your product, feel disappointed, and move on. Instead, focus on building loyal customers.
As you give customers what they want, you will build loyalty. They trust your business, and will turn to it for decades, and convince their friends to do the same. If you treat them like any new customer, they will feel resentment – you aren’t rewarding their loyalty!
Fixing Mistakes Slowly
Customers care more about how fast you fix mistakes than the fact that they happen in the first place. Although a blunder could cost your business a few customers, most will come back if you fix the problem quickly.
Always have a plan for any potential problems. You won’t predict everything that will go wrong with your business, but you can control how you react to mistakes. Setting up a system that helps employees point out problems and brainstorm fixes is all you need, but having a list of contacts you can rely on means you will pick better solutions because you have more options.
Legal and financial advice is always handy, but don’t forget about physical jobs too. Mechanical failure can cripple any business that delivers products to customers, and having a few logistical contacts means you can solve any transportation issues that come up.
Marketing Without A Plan
Businesses react one of two ways when they don’t have a marketing plan. Some are too scared to waste resources and don’t change enough, while others try every marketing strategy they know. Both strategies are bad for business, but the second mistake is harder to recognize.
Sharing content on social media is a popular marketing strategy, but is complex on its own. This is why experts recommend only using a few platforms. This is only one marketing strategy; imagine how complex using all of them would be.
Instead, strategise a marketing plan that makes sense for your resources and audience. Of course, you can market in different ways; hiring experts means you will know how well each strategy is working, and how to make adjustments. But expertise is expensive, and you could easily spread your resources too thin.
Losing Momentum
In business, momentum matters. Growing businesses need to capitalize on demand before their competitors. Stalling means they could fall behind and never catch up.
But how do you keep momentum going? First, look for easy opportunities while you work on your long-term strategy. If you sell packaged baked goods, for example, you could pitch your products to local stores.
Hiring passionate people also helps. Their creativity and energy will help push everyone to meet company goals; just make sure your products and services are worth praising.
Knowing when to scale, and how, is a skill every business should chase. Reaching a broader audience is a noble goal – just don’t let it cripple your business.
Business Process Improvement (BPI) is about making your business more effective, not just by digitising paper processes but also by saving you time. It can eliminate potential issues and see your business profit from faster, more streamlined real-time financial and transaction processing. World-class BPI should encompass liquidity and cash, optimise core accounting/reporting and improve workflow, service and efficiency within your organisation. And that’s what we deliver.
Four’s workflow, procurement, integration and contract management solutions draw on the latest Microsoft and Oracle technologies. Standards to guarantee the benefits of BPI are followed through and properly integrated with your other key systems.
Our consultants have helped many businesses fix or improve their infrastructure so that service levels and customers care can flourish, the key to revenue and profitability. We have delivered projects in challenging environments and then provided the mechanisms to report across the whole group of operations. We believe we can help any company start achieving its goals and objectives, today.