Achieving small business growth requires considerable time, effort, and attention to detail. We discuss five common scenarios below that can hinder small business growth along with what you can do to avoid or overcome them.
Failing to Consider the Impact of Competition
The SWOT method, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, enables you to explore where your business stands independently as well as how it stacks up against the competition. The information you uncover can be highly motivating to help you compete better. It’s also a good idea to analyze your competition, in the same way, using any public information you can find.
Overlooking Risk in the Early Growth and Planning Stages
New business owners often overlook how much risk they must take on for the business to grow. For example, you may struggle to hire qualified help as quickly as you would like, run into cash flow issues, or not receive the bulk discount savings you expected from some of your suppliers. Working through the threats you identified in the SWOT analysis can help you take on more of a big-picture mindset when it comes to working through these early problems.
Not Using Business Indicators to Your Full Advantage
Moving your business forward means understanding and acting on the information you obtain from your sales pipeline, market trends, and conversion rates. If you ignore business indicators, you won’t know whether to expand into new territory, purchase large equipment or amounts of inventory, close on a big deal, or act on other opportunities when they come along.
Not Taking Steps to Hire Quality Help Soon Enough
As the owner of a start-up business, it might be a while before you hire your first employee. Even so, it’s important to start considering the ideal candidates now since they can be difficult to find. You might also consider working with independent contractors who can complete project work for you as required. When your company starts growing, you can call on these people again to step in without needing additional training.
SCORE, which stands for Service Corp of Retired Executives, can match you with a business mentor at no charge. This can be an especially smart move early on when your business may not yet be profitable.
Lack of Cash Flow Planning
The inability to maintain adequate cash flow is one of the leading reasons small businesses fail. To avoid this fate, create cash flow forecasts regularly and do everything necessary to ensure your business always has cash coming in to meet its expenses. You might also consider a business line of credit or a credit card for those times when you simply can’t pull together cash fast enough to meet your business needs.
Capital Business Strategies is Here to Help You Succeed
Working with the experienced consultants at Capital Business Strategies can help to reduce your learning curve and financial losses. We invite you to contact us today to learn more about how our services can help you achieve small business growth.