War war but business needs to develop: seven tips on scaling company
I want to share my personal business rules that I have brought out for myself in the scaling of my company. Of course, they are not unique. However, they work because they are tested by experience and time. My tips will be useful not only for business owners who are already undergoing an active growth of the company, but also relevant for small startups that are only planning to scale.
The introduction of these approaches and principles of doing business will help you to scale it effectively and painlessly. Both the quantity and quality of active growth of your business at some point will lead to the number of ice, customers and orders that need to be given attention will exceed the amount of work that your employees can effectively handle. Therefore, it is obvious that you need to increase the size of your team to successfully scales the company.
However, the involvement of new workers is just a half way to victory. It is important not to perceive the scaling solely as an increase in the amount of anything, but also the maintenance (increase) of its quality. Therefore, follow the following: 1. New employees should undergo a spreading onboard, in which the techniques and processes used within the company should learn; Understand how to perform your duties with maximum efficiency. 2.
Make sure that communication between companies and individual employees is established and continuous - in your interests do not create a vacuum bubble between your employees. Without communication with each other and access to joint information, they become much less efficient and productive. 3. Finally, client information must be reliably ordered so that the increase in speed does not lead to chaos in processes.
Management, not control, if entrepreneurs "extinguish fires" in all areas of activity at the start of business, then it is important to master the delegation skill over time. And also - to stop personally control employees in their departments. The company manager should focus on management - on achieving goals. So, I advise you to immediately give up manual control and micro -management.
For a large number of people, excessive attention from the leader is a great stress that can reduce work efficiency and demotivation. You need to learn to trust the team, delegate tasks and release control. After all, you have chosen these people to be part of your company just so, they have all the necessary knowledge and skills to achieve the goals. The manager should only deepen the processes when the goals are not fulfilled.
Search for employees, give professionals when scaling you will definitely encounter the issue of team growth and employees. And although any manager wants to manage the hiring process, you should not try to look for employees yourself. If you do not have your HR company, find a partner agency and collaborate with it. It is much easier and finally cheaper than trying to find employees on your own.
If you calculate how much time you spend on interviews and how much it costs an hour of your time, you will understand - it is more profitable to entrust the search for employees to professionals. Professional recruiters have a ready -made candidate database, plus, they can save on qualifications. Especially this advice concerns such overloaded markets as IT. From my own experience, I will say that it is quite difficult to find a professional developer-synicore.
So, if you are looking for such a team, I advise you to delegate this task. A balanced growth of all business areas of the ideal is an unattainable myth. At least, this conclusion is that most of the owners of companies at their start. Therefore, instead of reorganizing and improving less developed business areas, at the time of launch, executives often simply close their eyes to the company's shortcomings and go into the market without understanding them. This is a common practice.
For example, I know a lot of businesses that have been marketable without selling and development problems, but with a markedly unfinished operating system. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. At the start of the business, you can not pay attention to and deal with the problems as they are received. However, as soon as the business goes to the scaling stage, a balanced growth of all directions becomes a priority. Sooner or later, the "problematic" segment will make itself known.
It is important to take into account everyone - even the smallest - details, consider all business segments and develop them in proportion. Understanding the causes of growth and focus in profitable directions and even with a balanced development, it is still important for you to understand what is the growth of business: where you earn the most and that it does not bring a special profit.
Managers at the start of the scale of business can keep a misconception that they do everything right, because as a result, they get more money. Having reached a certain level of income, you can start investing in different directions, not knowing their exact ROI (the financial factor that illustrates the level of profitability or loss of business, taking into account the amount of investments made in this business) - which is categorically incorrect.
If you did not have the experience of balanced growth, there is no awareness of what this growth was, which made the most profit, then it is difficult for you to understand the most profitable parties for zoom. It is important to reinvest a new profit into the right directions and channels that are profitable. But to be aware of what exactly worked and in what direction.
Using the right database tools, ideally, you should refuse to store customer data in Excel tables or-worse-notepads of sales managers before scale scale. Business loves order regardless of its size. But at the stage of active growth of the company, the transition to a special tool for collecting, storing and organizing client data is transformed into a necessity. For example, with the advent of the CRM system, your data will become much cleaner, complete and orderly.
Maximum process automation try to automate as many business processes as possible. So you save a few valuable hours of working time of tops and increase the level of customer conversion. For example, you can automate such routine work as data entry, writing repeated letters, the distribution of lid between sales managers, answers in chats.