Knowing the next steps to take with your business can be a minefield, but also a very exciting time in business ownership.
To help you make informed choices, in this article I want to cover some of the common pitfalls that business owners fall into when looking to grow their business. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but it is definitely a good place to start when thinking about the next steps in your business’s journey. For more growth tips, check out this article on ways to grow a startup.
Spending Too Much, Or Too Little…
This is a tough one, but when taking your next step as a business getting the spending right is very important. It can be tricky to know how to play it – under-invest and you risk losing out to competition with deeper pockets, but overextend yourself financially and you could be in real trouble. So, how do you know your hitting the right balance?
The key here is knowing your sector, and knowing your own brand inside out. What is it that makes you stand out, and how can investment help that? Similarly, what are your competitors upto, and how can investing in your own business help you compete?
Getting the level of investment right requires having a plan. If you know where you want your business to be in the coming years, it’s easier to budget correctly. This doesn’t need to be a rigid and inflexible set of deadlines, you need some room to react to changes in the marketplace. But if you have a good idea of when key events in your businesses development are going to happen, you’ll be in a great place to plan the dollars and cents needed to deliver those goals.
Also Read : 7 Traits of A Successful Business Leader
Keeping Data Secure
As a small business, data security may not have been a top priority. After all, there are a million other things to deal with at the outset. However, as your business grows, so does the amount of data you keep. This could be customer information, contact details for clients, or sensitive data about company goals and finances. As you grow and take on more staff, this also means more people with access to parts of these data sets. All this means that you have to think carefully about IT security, where data is stored and who has access to it.
You may think that your business is too small to be of interest to hackers. However, this is no longer the case. As Fidus, a UK-based penetration testing company, explain, there are all manner of malign actors who look to target smaller businesses, precisely because they know that security might not be as tight.
This shouldn’t make you worry, you just need to be careful and make sure that you have the correct protocols in place to make sure sensitive data is secure. If you are wondering what software is best for protecting you from viruses and malware, take a look at the site here for an overview of various antivirus tools and their associated reviews.
Trying To Do Everything On Your Own
Finally, you probably started out your business doing everything yourself. Being a jack of all trades is all part of running a start-up. However, if you’re looking to grow you have to let this mentality go. The simple fact is that real growth will mean you can no longer do everything yourself.
At first, this can be really daunting, and it might feel difficult to delegate. The trick is to keep telling yourself that it is a good thing because it means you can focus on the important strategic decisions. In fact, if you’re finding that you no longer can oversee everything, this is a good sign! It means your business has grown!
Ultimately, letting go of complete control will require that you trust the people around you to make the right decisions. This is something that grows with time, so although it will feel strange at first, in time it will feel completely normal to pass on responsibilities for certain areas of the business to colleagues. As a start, consider participating in planning for a particular area of your business and then delegating its execution. For example, if it’s social media, make sure to help come up with a social media plan and let your employees to actually work on it. Sooner or later, you’ll see that delegating is a necessary step when it’s time for your business to grow.