If you run a business, it’s more than likely you have desires to grow. But this probably comes with mixed emotions, one of which is usually fear.

Not a fear of growing, more a fear of what it will bring. Will you lose control of your processes? Do you have to invest in more hardware? And will you require a larger team, which can bring a whole new set of worries.

A larger team means more training and management. You’ll be faced with challenges finding the ideal people and building the right team, not to mention keeping your existing team happy and valued. There is a reason acquiring and retaining the right team members has been identified as a major barrier for all businesses.

And it’s no wonder that despite your yearning to grow, you might be tempted to stick with running your business the way you do now.

But why should you settle?

There is a better way.

Growing your business doesn’t always require a bigger team. You don’t need to turn your back on the reasons you built your business in the first place, spending endless hours recruiting and training, or create a whole set of new problems for yourself. Not if you are smart about how you approach your growth.

Be clever about the way you utilise your existing resources. Improve your efficiencies in every possible way by redesigning, defining, and documenting your processes. Automate wherever possible. Look at where you are making the most revenue and make changes that will empower your team to boost their output. If you can do this properly, growing your business will be a certainty. And this can be without any increase to your staff overheads.

Some of the essential steps to help you achieve this are:

    • Focus On Output – look at process refinement. Improving the method your team delivers output will lead to big gains – you will be able to produce more in less time.
    • Standardisation – You can’t improve a process if your team are doing the same tasks in a different manner to each other.
    • Improve Your Process – Explore every option to speed up the way every task is performed.
    • Automation – When you find ways to automate processes that were previously manual, you will start to see big gains in efficiency.
    • Look at where the revenue comes in—and where it doesn’t – look at the areas of your business where time and money is spent but takes a longer period of time to convert into sales. Explore avenues to reduce this time and standardising the process, or alternatively decide if this revenue stream is worth keeping.

Growth doesn’t have to be scary, it can be exciting and rewarding in more ways than one.