How to Overcome Company Growing Pains
Publié le 21 November 2022
Scaling up a successful business is never easy, and many company leaders will need to know how to overcome company growing pains to stay on the path to growth and longevity.
A company’s transition from start-up to scale-up won’t be easy. Like most things that grow, there will be changes that require adjustments along the way. Sometimes, these changes can be challenging, but it’s all part of the learning curve.
If you’re a business owner who’s preparing to scale up, expect to encounter “growing pains.” Since you’ll be expanding your operations and hiring more people, you’ll be managing a lot more compared to before. You’ll also be addressing and solving bigger issues.
It’ll definitely be an uphill climb but don’t be daunted by the stages. As you’ll feel more confidence and experience more satisfaction with each challenge you successfully overcome. Knowing how to overcome company growing pains will make your business stronger for the next set of challenges.
Common Business Growing Pains
Before digging into how you can best deal with the growing pains of a scale-up, it’s important to be aware of what challenges you should expect in the first place. Not only will this help you identify the root cause of your problems faster, but it’ll also get you to think ahead on how to process the situation and resolve it.
1. Communicating your growth strategy to the team
As a business grows, your mission may remain fairly fixed but your specific goals and objectives will evolve and change. Hence, you need a continuously updated strategic direction to follow.
Communicating your growth strategy to your team can be tricky because your employees will be introduced to it from different contexts. You have to explain to team members who’ve been with you since the beginning why and how the business is transforming. New employees, on the other hand, need to understand where the business is currently and its plan to grow.
You’ll be interacting with more people too. From working with only a handful of people, you’ll now be managing larger teams and departments. If people are not aligned on your business strategy and goals, miscommunication can happen.
2. Prioritizing the right things
There are many things you need to be doing when growing your business. Unfortunately, you can’t do all of them at the same time. You don’t have the time, money, or resources, so you need to set your priorities.
Moreover, as the Pareto principle states, “80% of results come from 20% of actions.” You don’t need to simultaneously juggle all business growth opportunities. Pinpoint the business strategy that can produce the most favorable results for your business.
The same goes for executing your strategy by determining the most pressing issues or activities that need to be prioritized. If your company, for example, is focused on improving the features of its products to sell to a larger market, you should mostly work on product development. Hire the right experts and invest in research and development before executing your marketing and sales strategy.
3. Identifying a suitable range of products and services
When you scale up your business, you’ll also have to assess the range of products and services you offer to your customers.
Will you be carrying the same set of products and services? Or will you expand it to introduce new features and benefits? Before making a choice, you have to consider the resources and opportunities available.
If you broaden your range of products and services, you’re inviting more work and operations. You have to ensure that you have the capacity to see it through. If not, you might stretch your resources too thin and compromise productivity, the effectiveness of your workforce and the well-being of your employees.
If you decide to simply focus on a limited set of products and services, you have to choose wisely which ones to market. It has to bring in positive sales and growth. If you limit yourself too much, you might be missing profitable opportunities.
4. Finding and managing your funding
Finding funding is always a struggle in whichever stage of the business, but it’s especially important when scaling up. You’re targeting rapid business growth, meaning a greater amount of expense is expected. Coming from a start-up with limited funding, you’ll need to bolster your capital to grow significantly.
Once your business is more established, you’ll have a lot more finance options. You can gain the trust of more lending institutions and potential investors with your business’s stability and performance.
The real challenge, however, is determining the right level and mix of funding. You can go with debt financing, equity financing, or a mix of both as long as you can ensure that you still have a healthy debt-to-equity ratio. You also have to consider securing money from investors with a common interest, as you will also be managing your debts and commitments to lenders.
Managing the financial investments you receive is also crucial in the growth stage. Once you get your hands on the additional capital, you need to be smart about spending it. You have to put it towards activities that will sustain your operations and business growth.
5. Achieving bigger sales targets
Sales play a critical role in growing your business. For it to expand and increase profits, you’ll need a good marketing and sales strategy to bring in customers on a larger scale. Your sales performance is also one of the main points investors will look at.
Lots of factors will affect your sales. Your products and services have to be aligned with your customers’ needs. There also needs to be a skilled sales and marketing team with a strong business plan to promote your business. Finding out exactly what your customers need and determining how you can provide it to them is a great way to overcome company growing pains as you find your market niche.
Practical Tips From The Frontline
While being aware of various business growing pains can be helpful, you need to tackle them head-on to overcome them. It may seem like an overwhelming responsibility, but don’t forget that you also have an expanding team to support you with attaining your goals.
It’s also useful to have the right expertise to guide you, especially when you have pivotal decisions to make. Working with business experts who’ve personally lived through several growing pains and emerged with successful businesses can be a smart move. Their first-hand experiences and knowledge can give your business an advantage when determining how to overcome company growth pains.
To get you started, here’s helpful advice from Boardroom Advisors who’ve had years of experience supporting scale-up businesses on the frontline:
1. Strengthening your operations
“Scaling up works best when your people, processes, and systems are already operating smoothly. Making sure your foundations are strong now will bear fruit later. Trying to accelerate growth if you have areas of operational weakness will introduce unnecessary risk.”
– Harry Cruickshank, Boardroom Advisor
Little problems can add up and eventually cause larger and more disastrous problems in the long run. It’s best to nip it in the bud while the issue is more manageable. It can also make your business environment conducive for growth.
It’s recommended to use tried-and-tested strategy analysis tools so that you understand the areas that need your attention the most. Doing a SWOT Analysis, for example, can polish your company’s operations. It’ll help you see strengths and opportunities that you can maximize as well as weaknesses and threats that need to be addressed.
2. Plan your growth strategy holistically
“We need to get all elements of the engine in sync with each other, and that starts with leadership, creating the right culture, environment, and plans, and getting everyone and everything aligned for future growth.”
– Adrian Kingsford, Boardroom Advisor
You want your business to operate like a well-oiled machine. For this to happen, you need to set a clear strategic direction for the business. It’ll give everyone a unified goal and build a stronger team overall.
A MOST Analysis is also a good strategy analysis tool for turning your strategic direction into an actionable plan. By defining your mission first, you’ll be able to craft specific objectives, strategies, and tactics per department across your organization. Your employees will have different targets, but their results will contribute to the same goal.
3. Invest in your people
“By hiring enthusiastic individuals to promote and sell your product and providing them with good onboard training, you’ll be in a better position than your competitors to drive revenues and achieve success.”
– Jonathan Hebbes, Boardroom Advisor
Your business growth doesn’t only rely on its leadership and strategy. The major bulk of the work will come from your people. Invest in them by hiring the best people and equipping them with the essential resources and skills.
Developing your employees can lead to long-term success because they’ll be motivated to perform well knowing that there is a clear career path full of growth and opportunity ahead of them. They’ll feel empowered to contribute and offer their own insights to improve the company’s products or services, sales, and operations.
4. Listen to your customers
“Focus on delighting your customers, listen to them, and improve your product or service persistently.”
– Kiran Addala, Boardroom Advisor
Aside from your employees, your customers also matter. They’re the people you’re serving, after all. You have to constantly listen to what they need and want in order to steer them towards your business.
Their concerns can let you see potential marketing opportunities as well as ways to develop your products and services. It can also help you gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and if you’re meeting your current sales targets.
5. Delegate and seek support
“Don’t become a blocker to growth. You can’t do everything, so seek strategic advice, get support, and delegate… Give yourself time to think and rest so you can plan for the future and clearly communicate to everyone the goals and what is expected of them.”
– Eian Hardacre, Boardroom Advisor
Sometimes, you might find yourself in unfamiliar territory when experiencing business growing pains. Lots of things can happen at the same time and making the wrong move entails a lot of risk and cost.
When you experience this, don’t be afraid to seek support in order to learn how to overcome company growing pains. There are business experts out there who can review your business and help you with strategic growth planning. It’s better to have another set of eyes review your business plan and offer strategic advice.
Aside from that, the burden of growing the business is not just your own. As your business expands, your team does too. You hired them to help you achieve your vision, so allow them to do so by communicating your strategic direction clearly.
If you can trust them to do their jobs, you’ll have more time to focus on business strategy and management. This will allow you to advance your company further and sustain its success for a longer period of time.
So don’t be deterred by a company’s growing pains. See them as hurdles to reach the next level and opportunities to make your company more resilient in the long run.
