With growth plans on the horizon, you need effective expansion strategies to avoid challenges that can disrupt the process. Scaling a business is a pivotal and often daunting task, filled with obstacles that can impede progress.
Here, we share five common challenges of scaling a business, along with practical tips and strategies to navigate and overcome these hurdles successfully.
1. Bad Timing
Jumping the gun and scaling too early creates a domino effect of challenges, often focused on finances.
If you have lower profit compared to your operational costs, chances are you’ve timed your scaling too soon.
Solution: Meet with your accountant or a business consultant to understand the bigger picture of your financing. If all seems well, test the market to ensure it can support your scaling plans to avoid losses.
2. Leaving Your Company Culture Behind
Your company culture aligns with your values and beliefs, creating a desirable work environment that attracts and retains top talent.
It is the heart and soul of your business, creating exceptional experiences for your team and customers. However, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain your company culture when scaling your business. This can lead to rapid turnover of your early hires who know your business, creating chaos.
Solution: Use your most respected team members as the compass for your expansion strategies. This helps existing employees remain focused on their mission while integrating new hires into a culture that shares their values. This also ensures you maintain the same customer experience.
3. Failing to Scale Processes
The processes you have today aren’t necessarily going to work for your growing business.
It can be hard to know what new roles you should introduce and how those new roles fit your current operations. This can lead to disparity between existing and new team members or the introduction of new departments. It also puts stress on your team, which can lead to a complete breakdown of current systems as people struggle to keep up.
Solution: Review operations to determine how growth will impact your processes. Consult with department heads and teams to help identify things like skills gaps or possible staff shortages that will make scaling your business challenging. It is often better to outsource new roles to help fill gaps, see how they work, and then use those results to inform your hiring decisions.
4. Not Including Leadership Management
You trust your management team to lead your workforce and contribute to your growth and success.
However, as you grow it isn’t uncommon to put too much focus on hiring team members and overlooking the need for new management or structural adjustments. You want to remain loyal to the managers who have gotten you this far, but you also need to revisit your structure to find opportunities to adjust a flat management structure that no longer serves you.
Solution: Keep communication open so managers feel safe sharing issues they encounter during the scaling period. Assess your structure to identify if leadership in new initiatives is lacking and find opportunities to introduce new expertise to your management team. It might also be a matter of shuffling your current managers and assigning new, clearly defined roles.
5. Poor Time Management
Poor time management interferes with the business-critical functions of your day-to-day operations. Without effectively delegating elements of your expansion projects, you can’t succeed.
Solution: Adapt a forward planning strategy that leverages your trusted managers and team members to ensure all aspects of the business remain controlled.
By adopting expansion strategies, you can build a sustainable business aligned with your goals and company culture.
About Focus HR, Inc.
Focus HR, Inc. uncomplicates the people side of business by providing small business owners with outsourced HR, project HR, and Leadership Coaching. For more information, please contact us today! If you liked this post, please subscribe to our blog. You can opt out at any time.
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