For many businesses, continued growth and expansion is the ultimate goal. Development often means increased profitability; it means market domination; it means happy managers, employees and stakeholders. However, your push for growth can only be successful if you have the means to facilitate it. Without effective tools and resources to enforce your business’s drive for supremacy, you may end up experiencing a slow and uncomfortable grind to a halt.
It’s an unfortunately common problem. But why does it happen?
Your business can only sustain growth if it has the support structure in place to manage the inevitable increase in workload and demand. No support structure? Growth becomes impossible. You effectively hit a resource wall.
The only way to climb this wall is to input more resources. Sure, this may be possible, but in that timeframe between finding your business ceiling and working out how to raise it, you’ve slowed down.
To avoid losses as a result of unsustainable growth, you need to be prepared. Preparation allows you to meet expansion head-on and enables continued growth without having to pump the breaks.
Being at a loss is never a good thing in business. You want to know what to do, and where to turn to, when your company starts to flourish. How do you achieve this kind of awareness? Through strategy and planning.
Evaluate your business now. Think about:
- What kind of growth are you aiming for?
- How much growth do you expect to achieve?
- In what space of time do you anticipate you’ll see growth?
- What would you need to handle such growth?
For a retailer, you might say:
- What kind of growth are you aiming for?
More product sales.
- How much growth do you expect/want to achieve?
A 15% increase.
- In what space of time do you anticipate you’ll see growth?
One year.
- What would you need to handle such growth?
More product stock, a larger warehouse, faster shipping processes, more accounts management staff and more product sales pages on my website.
Questioning growth lets you know what you might need should it actually occur. Taking our example, if you were to see a rise in sales by 15% but couldn’t cope with such demand, you would face two major problems:
- You wouldn’t be able to properly take advantage of the growth for better profitability
- You may disappoint customers through unfulfilled orders or delays, and damage your reputation
If you aren’t ready to scale, you aren’t ready to achieve more for your business. The issue is that buying up those resources and tools that support growth now could end up being wasteful. If things change, or growth doesn’t occur, you could be left with a business model scaled to the wrong levels. The result would be increased expenditure without the income to support your resources.
Bad news for your business.
Instead, by having a strategy in place, you know exactly where to go if growth should suddenly start to run away from you. Once you know what you need, you can then work out how to obtain the resources to manage those needs.
But who or what is going to facilitate expansion?
Make a list outlining the methods of resource acquisition that will allow you to grow. This could include:
- New suppliers
- Specialist business software
- Recruiters and hiring agencies
- Third-party service firms, such as legal and financial
- New property and business premises
When strategising potential resource providers, it’s important to also think about the time involved in going from your current status to a place where the resources are in place and ready to use.
Let’s say you will need a new sales representative to handle that 15% increased volume following growth. How are you going to acquire said salesperson and how long will it reasonably take to successfully onboard them? If you know the process takes a minimum of two months, you’ll need to monitor growth carefully and think about when to start recruitment.
How Software and Digital Solutions Can Support Growth
Strategy and planning provide excellent support structures for scalability, but they aren’t your only options when it comes to protecting your company from hitting that dreaded resource wall.
Successfully employing this tactic is all about effective adaptability; it’s about being able to go with the flow. So what if you already had tools in place that were inherently adaptive; tools that you can acquire now that allow your business to scale at a later date without causing waste?
In this example, we’re going to look at the humble fax.
For many businesses, fax is still an important part of communication. From legal firms to healthcare providers, it remains essential. As your business grows, you will likely need to send more and more fax documents.
However, as you start to scale up, you hit that resource wall.
You don’t have enough fax machines to handle demand. You don’t have the storage space to manage files sent and received. You are increasing your expenditure on necessary costs like toner, paper and maintenance without allocating more money for these outgoings in the budget.
With enough resource input, you can recover. You can buy more machines; you can get more storage; you can invest in regular maintenance, and so on. However, you’ve slowed down and lost time because you weren’t to capacity.
And then what happens if you then hit a slump? You’ve got large fax machines taking up room. You’ve got fax lines you have to pay for that you don’t need. And now you’ve got lots of wasted storage units forcing you to pay for office space you don’t need.
While these might have been problems for businesses of the past, it’s not a problem for the modern-day company thanks to the development of digital technology.
Online faxing removes the potential for this kind of problem. It takes away the need for fax machines, storage and applicable resources. Instead, everything is handled digitally, and fax is sent over the internet.
What does this mean for scalability? It means if you need to up your fax output, you just send more faxes. If you need to reduce your output, you simply don’t send so many. Software removes the barriers to effective scalability by offering flexibility that fax machines don’t.
You can apply the idea of adaptive business software to many other facets of your operations.
Other examples include sales marketing and website development. Online tools can make it easier for you to reach more customers. Rather than having to slowly scale traditional methods like calls and leaflets, you can use digital tools to automate communications and marketing. Likewise, software exists that can easily allow you to adapt the size of your website and scale it with product launches and stock availability, etc. instead of having to rebuild whenever you face change.
The Key Takeaway for Better Scalability
Scalability is all about preparation. Combine strategy with adaptable digital tools and your business will be ready for whatever growth is heading your way.
Don’t miss out on opportunities for greater profitability because you weren’t prepared for success. Think about how you are going to manage business development and you’ll never need to worry about hitting the resource wall.