One of the most common problems business owners face in the long run is an inability to handle sudden rapid growth. It’s common for a company to get into a favorable situation where they attain a large number of new clients, but in some cases, this can ironically be the thing that kills the business completely. If you’re not properly prepared for scaling up and expanding in the right directions, you’ll quickly get overwhelmed by the many additional decisions that you must make, and your company might go under like so many others have in the past.
Integrate Optimization into the Workflow
It’s important that you’re striving to optimize your work at every step. There are some practices that you can adopt that will prove extremely helpful in this regard. Look into things like Lean Six Sigma, and see if they could be viable solutions to some of the problems you might be facing in your own company. From teaching you about the importance of proper physical layouts and cross-training to allowing you to scale up every aspect of your organization independently, they’re methodologies that can bring a lot to the table and are very valuable in the right hands.
Hire Contractors for the Right Things
You should avoid trying to handle everything in-house. This can quickly bury you under a significant workload that you can never realistically handle. Sure, you might think that you’ll just keep hiring more and more employees to compensate for the new work that’s opened up, but the reality is that this will cause you to make many mistakes in your hiring process, and you’ll very likely end up lowering your standards just to fill some holes that have opened up. In the end, your company will not function as it used to, and you’ll be in big trouble. So, for example, if you’re in California and looking to acquire extra help, try keying in Bay Area facility management companies or similar phrases to find the company you need, and make use of the booming market.
Don’t Be Afraid to Downscale
It’s difficult to destroy something you’ve built with your own hands and even more so when it affects the livelihoods of other people. But if analysis shows that a certain part of your organization is causing more problems than it resolves, you should consider cutting it out of the picture in order to save the whole company. Remember that this doesn’t have to necessarily imply the termination of any employees – you may be able to relocate them to other areas of the organization if they are valuable enough.
Don’t find yourself in a position where your organization is ready to face the growing demands of the market but you’re not in a position to support it on that road. This is the one thing that single-handedly kills the biggest number of up-and-coming companies out there. If you don’t want to get swept up by the same storm, you should think very carefully about any aspects of your workflow that you may be able to handle externally by outsourcing the tasks. You’ll often find that there are plenty of opportunities for that, as long as you’re willing to reach out and look them up in the first place.
