What things are stopping you from growing your business?
Nov 1, 2021

What things are stopping you from growing your business?
Have you just started a business but it’s not growing as quickly as you imagined, or have you been in business for a few years and seem to have hit a wall? Perhaps you’re not sure where to go from here or what your next steps should be… Below are some of the key areas to look at to help you get back on to that journey of growth!
You don’t have to do it all!
When you first start out, it’s likely that it will be you wearing all the different hats you need to run a business – marketing, IT and finance to name a few – as well as managing the key service or product itself. As you start to grow it’s difficult to maintain all those hats because time becomes scarce as more and more demands are put on you and before you know it, you’re feeling overwhelmed and business has ground to a halt.
You’ve probably got an emotional attachment because it’s your own business, and you might have difficulty separating yourself, taking time out and letting go of things. But it’s crucial that you do those things because without doing so, your business will falter and potentially fail.
The key thing is that you don’t have to do it all yourself!
You need to focus on running the business and doing the things that you are expert at – why you set up in the first place. There are other experts around to help and support with the areas that you’re not as strong in or don’t particularly enjoy or want to do! There are people that can deal with IT issues or make sure social media posts are all written and scheduled or can manage the day-to-day bookkeeping.
Whether it’s recruiting staff or outsourcing to experts, it doesn’t matter – just surround yourself with people that you trust to support you and your business growth and stop doing everything on your own! At Troy, we outsource all our marketing, HR and IT support which gives us the time back that we were spending on trying to do it ourselves, and don’t tell anyone, but they do it WAAAYY better than we ever did!!
Build strong foundations
Having strong foundations in place from the outset is crucial to enabling a business to grow. Without these, there is a strong possibility that things will start falling over and getting out of control as you take on more customers, make more sales or take on more staff.
One of the elements is as mentioned above – having the right people in place whether they are staff or outsourced support. Whichever model you decide is the right one, there will be a cost to it which you might be apprehensive about – after all, you’re trying to grow your business, so you need to keep costs down right? Well, no, not necessarily.
Ultimately, if you’ve got the right people with the right skill sets in place, they will help you to grow the business and manage growing demands, ensuring the customer service and deliverables are still met.
The other foundation to ensure success is efficient processes. To start with, these might not necessarily all be automated, but as far as possible you need processes in place that can operate without your intervention and deliver a consistent output, whether you have 10 customers or 1,000 customers!! The processes should, as far as possible, have no failure points or duplicated effort and should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that they are always fit for purpose.
As your business grows and evolves, it goes without saying that the processes need to adapt and evolve alongside that growth. It’s fair to say that ensuring you have robust processes and structure in place can take time to do, but it’s absolutely worth the investment and will be proven when you see the results!
The right people and the right processes
At Troy, we’re constantly refining the things that we do, not just from our own internal perspective but from a customer journey perspective too to ensure we’re delivering our service to our customers in the best way that we can.
Know your finances
Obviously close to our hearts here at Troy Accounting! Earlier this month, we wrote a blog on this very subject which you can read here. It addressed things like understanding cashflow and pricing, and some of the more granular elements of understanding where your costs lie.
In addition to that though, you need to have business plans in place as well as understanding how these are performing against actual results and cashflow. You need to review all this and your finances overall on a regular basis which we believe should be at least once a month if not more.
Make sure you’re happy that the pricing for your services or products reflects the value that you and your customers place on them, and that you’re not undercutting yourself to just try and get a sale. Really value what you’re worth.
Have a clear vision and understand your finances
Lastly, have a clear vision for the direction you want your business to move in which is then a good starting point for success. Importantly though, define what your version of success is because it might not be about growth. You don’t have to grow your business just because it’s what you think you should do – you have to want to grow.
And if you want to grow, hopefully, you’ve found our thoughts on the key areas of growth helpful!! If you’d like to chat anything through in more detail, then BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL with Boo or Helen or drop us a message to [email protected].
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