May 2018
Fly or Fall: The Importance of Cementing Operations Before Leaping into Growth
A key part of the small business experience is undoubtedly the moment when you realise that it’s time to grow: and you stand on the edge of change wondering if you’ll fly or fall. What can make or break that journey, however, is the strength of your operational foundation – how steady is yours?
Stepping Up the Game
When small businesses reach the stage of their lives when they’re ready to take their offering further, increase customers, and expand the team, there’s often that feeling of hesitation. If you’ve been in this situation before, you might recognise it as being a sensation somewhat akin to when you’re about to jump off a cliff (if you do that sort of thing). Remember that metaphor, as we’ll be coming back to it.
Rather than focusing on the anxiety that comes with stepping up your business’ game, the best thing to do is to consider the excitement and potential of such a move instead. After all, taking this giant leap will show your competitors and customers how serious you are about success.
But before you go jumping off the cliff – throwing yourself into growth measures – you need to put in place operations which can ensure your business is being run in the best way possible. This will include everything from policies and procedures, to branding and workflows. It’s a lot to put in place, and you can never be too careful with the tools you use to do it.
Limiting Your Thinking
Where many small businesses go wrong is at this very stage. Before making that leap, they need to be completely prepared and ask themselves questions such as “are my operations scalable once we begin to grow?” and “are my employees confident in how the business is run?”.
For many, these questions can be answered by looking at the resources they have in position to handle their operations. Their choices have the power to limit their operations and scupper growth plans before they’ve even begun. In some cases, small businesses have stuck to their guns and the systems which have helped them to get to this position in the first place. Unfortunately, those systems can include Excel spreadsheets and a reliance on email and printed documents.
Not only can such systems complicate operations and cause issues around security, they’re also extremely difficult to grow alongside the business. Suddenly, faithful spreadsheets become unwieldly beasts, and new staff require additional training, slowing down output from the employees helping them.
Breaking Free
Luckily, there’s a solution that allows businesses to break free from these limitations and allow them to take that leap with confidence and a running jump. Whereas some operations managers are quick to point to off-the-shelf tools, these don’t always integrate well, have features you’ll never use, and remain disparate parts which may need replacing once additional growth takes place.
Instead, small businesses are turning to bespoke CRMs to help them take their business’ operations to the next level. Not only does a bespoke CRM solution provide security and reliability without the cost of onsite servers or an in-house IT team, it can also ensure workflows are managed, processes are streamlined, and operations are concrete.
By making use of third-party integration and the bespoke nature of the CRM, small businesses can also take comfort in knowing that they have all the resources they need to grow and keep growing – with the platform evolving alongside them in a manageable capacity.
Like taking that leap of faith into growth, embracing new solutions was always going to be an inevitable step in helping your business to succeed. Doing so could make all the difference between flying and falling – and which would you rather do?
Yes, we’re a little biased when it comes to CRMs – after all, we suspect 2018 will be the Year of the Bespoke CRM – but don’t just take our word for it. Get in touch with Lunar CRM to arrange a free demo of our bespoke CRM solution and see for yourself what it could do for your operations.