One of the biggest fears of all small business owners is that their business won’t grow and will ultimately fail. In fact, nearly 75 percent of all small businesses are run by one employee, the business owner, and it can feel nearly impossible to get past that point.
Continued growth is necessary for any business to achieve long-term success. Here are five simple ways to help your small business grow:
Growing your business requires more work and new skills. It can also mean bringing on new partners and employees. While the prospect of taking your one-man team further is exciting, you also need to make a plan and seriously evaluate your skills before taking the plunge. Are you prepared to manage a team of people? Is your personality more suited to working alone or do you thrive in a team environment? If you aren’t prepared to manage a team long term are you willing to bring on a manager who can? The answers to these questions are critical as you make your plan for growth.
It is also critical to have solid business processes in place before you jump right into bringing on new employees and clients. You need to have a plan for how you will manage new clients and divvy up work amongst new employees before you begin hiring and pursuing new business. If you have a certain way you like things to be done you would also be wise to record those processes so they are easy to explain to your new hires.
Another of the five simple ways to help your small business grow is to make the switch to cloud accounting. An excel spreadsheet might have been a decent way to record your business’s finances when you first started, but it will be impossible to keep up as your business grows. We recommend using QuickBooks Online, which allows you to record transactions, create invoices, and pull reports from anywhere. QuickBooks can also be used to manage your payroll.
While growing your business is exciting it can also be costly. You will need to budget for the costs associated with growth to make sure you don’t overextend yourself. For example, figure out what the cost is per new client and how much you would need to pay an employee to help you manage the additional workload.
Marketing your business well is the last of the five simple ways to help your small business grow. A killer marketing plan is key to bringing on new clients and projects. If you don’t have an attractive and easy to navigate website that would be the first place to start. You will also need to make sure your website is SEO friendly and mobile-friendly. Social media also offers a lot of inexpensive and free marketing options.