I wanted to grow one of my ventures to yield more income and realized I needed to do something different on the inside of the company to accommodate the influx of customers and additional sales. If as a business owner you’ve decided to grow, get more customers and increase revenue, there are certain things you need to do to fulfill your customers’ needs and sustain that growth. In fact, on the flip side, many companies stay where they are because they do not have systems in place to accommodate growth.
For the particular venture I mentioned, I always held back on advertising due to fear of not being able to meet customer demands when they started calling. Don’t hold back, but let your business grow. Start by taking these steps.
1. Eliminate Bottlenecks. Anticipate or determine where the bottle necks will be when demand increases. Streamline that process or hire additional help. For example in a restaurant, having only one chef and many servers may no longer work when demand increases. The bottle neck will be with the chef’s tasks. Either streamline the work the chef does or hire another chef. (By the way, let’s talk if you want to learn how to streamline a process)
2. Embrace standard work. With more demand, more work, and more employees, in order to make sure your quality is not compromised, create procedures for all the work done. A good procedure outlines who, what, when, where, and how for each job or task.
3. Focus on your strengths and what is required and hire additional help for other tasks such as administrative tasks that may be taking up your time from doing income producing activities. Also, add to your team someone who can do what you cannot do well. It's okay when you lack skills in some areas. It's okay not to know it all. I began to be okay with not knowing it all and started looking for people to help me with what I wasn't good at. Mother Theresa understood this principle: I can do what you cannot do, you can do what I cannot do, together we can do great things.
4. Cut the fat by eliminating unecessary steps in your processes. For example, is there a task you are currently performing that's redundant or is no longer needed? Tasks such as signing documents or entering data that no one cares about, or collecting and recording information from customers that you never use, and other activities that do not add anything to the growth of your business. Go through your processes and identify areas of waste so that you can eliminate them.
Have you been holding back on investing in your business because of the fear of not being able to meet customer needs? Do you think implementing one or more of these ideas could help?
Kemi Sorinmade
Learn.Improve.Grow.Achieve