Why business growth is about more than just sales...

For a business to be sustainable it needs to make profit.

And so as your business starts to grow, the traditional start up model of 'sales at any cost' starts to become irrelevant.

Structure, process, systems. Three words that all have the tendency to make people’s eyes glaze over. But what if they’re exactly what you need to create the sustainable, profitable business you know you deserve? If you’ve done the start-up bit and you’re consistently making sales you will start to feel as though you’ve 'got a business’, but if you’re also still stuck in every bit of detail and you know it couldn’t survive without you then you've also got a millstone. Many business owners get to this stage and feel like they’re working their arse off with no light at the end of the tunnel. You feel like you should be making way more money than you are. How can you possibly grow further when you don’t have enough hours in the day as it is? You know there’s things you could be doing better but you never get time to look at them and as long as the business is still going along as it is then you probably won’t either. You thought the hard work would be over once you got to a certain size but that never seems to happen.

The reality is that if you don’t take the right steps, you’ll never grow past a certain point. You may keep growing sales but your profits won’t reflect all the hard work that takes. Your supplier and customer relationships will not be managed properly. You’ll be leaving money on the table and not only that, you’ll actually waste money. On a personal level, you’ll never get any space and you’ll carry on doing all the roles.

Fear not… it can be relatively simple to create the space (and profit) you crave. You just need to recognise what stage you’re at and then make a plan to move from start up to grown up. Simply put, you need to add the structure, processes and systems that are impossible to create during the start up phase but absolutely crucial to take your business through the growth stage and into a more established place. This is the time to work out what you want your business, and your life, to look like. It’s time to break things down and uncover the issues and pain points. You will need to spend time understanding your most profitable products, customers and revenue streams. Do more of the things that work, and less of the things that don’t. This may need some tough decisions and temporary loss of control as you bring people in to the team but it will be worth it. Work out what’s costing you money, do less of those things too. Work out what you can outsource.

This is the best point to invest time and money into making life easier and fuelling the growth. You can’t pour from an empty cup. This is called optimisation and it’s what will move your business forward. If you don’t know where to start, I can help. Why not book a 30 minute discovery call to chat things through https://rebeccamorley.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?appointmentType=1939183