If there is anything that all businesses can agree on, it’s that everyone wants to avoid “the stall.” When your business trajectory is moving in the right direction, most of your business operations seem to run more smoothly. It becomes easy to secure additional funding with banks or investors, and the company is able to reinvest in itself to keep innovating its products and services.
But during a period of stagnancy or, even worse, decline, it can be difficult to reverse the trend without making difficult business sacrifices. For new businesses, though, it can be challenging to know how to minimize these slow periods and keep revenues and profitability in the green zone.
The great thing is that many startup businesses have gone through this process successfully and have uncovered a variety of effective growth strategies that can be followed.
What are the Main Challenges New Businesses Face?
Dealing with unique growth challenges is par for the course when building a new business. Some of the common ones are:
Financial Struggles — Launching a startup company is rarely affordable. There are a variety of upfront costs required to establish sustainable infrastructure, and many times, it’s difficult to establish reasonable long-term financial forecasts with enough historical sales history. This means many smaller businesses can struggle to get adequate financial backing from their banks to help them scale, leaving their budgets thin.
Tough Competition — It doesn’t matter what industry you’re entering, chances are you’ll need to contend with various giants with substantial marketing budgets at their disposal. This can be a tough cost of entry for many organizations and make it more difficult for them to start differentiating themselves from the competition.
Hiring Difficulties — Growing a business successfully often requires the help of qualified and highly dedicated staff. But it isn’t always easy to attract top-quality talent when you’re a new business. In fact, many times, you’ll be competing with other established businesses with proven credibility when using the same talent pool. This can make hiring processes much longer and more costly for the business.
Effective Strategies to Help You Grow Your Business
Regardless of where you are in your business development, there are proven strategies you can follow to help ensure you’re able to continuously grow year-over-year:
Keep Your Customers First Above All
Focusing on improving a product design or perfecting your marketing strategies is great, as long as it continues to align with your customer's needs. All too often, businesses can get caught up in establishing what they feel is a great growth strategy but aren’t continuously keeping their customers first above everything.
It’s important to stay grounded in your business and constantly look for ways to collect customer feedback and prioritize their issues “first” before thinking about ways to scale the business into new markets or experiment with different sales approaches.
Create the Right Hiring Strategy
If you don’t have a qualified team you can leverage, chances are your business’s growth will eventually become capped. Thinking ahead of your current size and acquiring the right team members is so important to help you sustain your growth path.
To do this, however, you’ll need to think of different ways you can widen your talent pool and attract more qualified talent. Focus your efforts on creating job descriptions that open the doors for highly adaptable and eager individuals willing to learn and grow in a startup environment.
While established professional credentials can be important, it’s often better to focus on finding the right personalities who are happy to change and develop in alignment with the company.
Avoid Always Relying On Your Gut
Listening to your gut as a business owner is important, but it shouldn’t be the only way you operate. Startup companies will often have a number of critical decisions they need to make in the early stages that can directly impact how well they manage their growth. Many of these decisions should be made with the guidance of real, proven data.
Enabling more data-driven decision-making can be achieved by creating relevant KPIs (key performance indicators) for the business. This could be tracking customer acquisition costs and conversion rates as well as monitoring website traffic after various SEO initiatives are made. Regardless, be sure to validate any of your gut feelings with concrete data when available.
Create a More Sustainable Growth Path
Growing your business successfully doesn’t need to be a painstaking process so long as you’re applying the right strategies. By following some of the basic strategies discussed while never being afraid to take calculated risks along the way, you’ll be sure to extract your full business potential and ensure any growth your business has in the future is sustainable.
By Michael Bollinger
Michael Bollinger, a Lexington, Kentucky-based entrepreneur, has left a lasting mark on the tech and software landscape. As the founder of LegFi and File990, Michael launched PayHOA.com in 2018 after Togetherwork acquired his first two ventures.
PayHOA is an affordable community management software for homeowner associations that streamlines payments, communication, and vendor management. Beyond his entrepreneurial pursuits, Michael finds fulfillment as a devoted husband and a loving father to his three children.