Expert Advice for Medium and Midsize Businesses
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Growth Corner,
SMB
July 6, 2017
Is Company Expansion Costing You Sleep? Fix These Challenges and Get Some Zzzzs
Owning a business has always be a part of the American dream. In fact, over 60 percent of employees would rather start their own business than work for someone else.
In a way, that is understandable. Who would not want to make the rules and be in charge of their own schedule and responsibilities? But if your company cannot move past its one good idea and grow over time, then you have started a fad and not a company.
So what are the challenges that small and medium business (SMB) executives and owners face as they look to grow their business?
Oracle recently partnered with Inc. Magazine to find out. We wanted to get in the head of these leaders and learn what keeps them up at night. The results, in some ways, were not surprising. Selling more, finding the right people, and effectively managing their companies’ growth were the three things they said gave them insomnia.
Expansion Issues
In many ways, starting a business is the easy part. Successfully expanding through all the different lifecycle stages is the hard part. Two-thirds of all businesses fail within 10 years, and there are several reasons for this.
- Costs skyrocket and impact cash flow in a negative way.
- Sales sink after SMB owners’ and executives’ work through their own network of friends and business acquaintances.
- It becomes obvious that many who joined the company in its infancy may not be the best people for a particular job during a particular stage of growth.
- New products and/or services do not make it to market fast enough.
As you transition from start-up to established company, sustainable, stable growth has to be your priority. This means that you need to continue to find and land new customers, even though all the “low-hanging fruit” is gone.
You have to keep your costs in line even as you rapidly bring on new employees. Employees are one of your most valuable (but costly) assets. Finally, the idea that started it all may have lost or outgrown its market, and you are struggling to get new products or services to market quickly.
Solutions for Your Expansion Challenges
- Get a handle on your cash. In many ways, cash is king. Many businesses fail because they cannot pay their bills, not because they lack profits on their financial documents.
- Don’t let your sales process be the major inhibitor to your growth. A recent survey found that 28 percent of SMBs still use spreadsheets to record sales quotes, budgets, customer management data, etc. Getting the right CRM software in place allows sales teams to do more with less. You can push sales through the pipeline quicker, create repeatable and uniform processes ―with the most up-to-date customer information. And that can do wonders for profits and revenues.
- Get the right management team in place. Understand when you should bring on certain people. For example, is there enough work to justify a full-time hire? Should you first hire a CFO or a CSO? Should you bring in a director of IT and groom her for the CIO position or look for a CIO right off the bat? The possibilities are endless.
- Become skilled at attracting, recruiting, and retaining passive candidates. Focus on retaining your “A” players early in their career. Develop succession plans to ensure that you are able to keep those key employees engaged and your SMB equipped with the talent it needs to grow.
- Reduce time-to-market. Trust me, your great idea was noticed, and other companies are already at work looking to erode your market share. So take a look at how you innovate. Do you have the technology to allow your employees to work efficiently and collaboratively? Are there workflows set up or are you asking employees to work with clunky disconnected systems that make their jobs difficult and laborious to complete?
Intrigued? Want to know how to actually do these 5 things? Check out Oracle’s newest SMB ebook: Company Growth Costing You Sleep? SMB Leaders’ Top Expansion Challenges…and How to Fix Them.
In this informative ebook you will learn what it takes to get the right management team in place, out-compete your competition, cost-effectively scale and get your products and/service to market quicker than the other guys...so you can rest easy at night.
So don’t wait, download our ebook today!
