3 Tips for building sustainable business growth

Picture the scene, after years of blood, sweat and tears from developing your business concept in the early days through to building a stable revenue stream you have cracked it…you now have real traction in the market. And it doesn’t stop there, this impressive growth is only the start, you have grand plans for the future. But ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ as Voltaire wrote (or Uncle Ben said if you are a Spider-Man fan).

There are a multitude of new challenges that need to be overcome to succeed with fast business growth. Without proper management, growing too fast can lead to the demise of a business.

I have picked out some areas that I commonly see that affect growing businesses and how they can be overcome.

1. Focus on Important v urgent work

As Eisenhower said ‘I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent’. It can be a natural tendency to focus on unimportant urgent tasks rather than making time for the important areas that will make the largest impact on a business.

• Step back and take a helicopter view of the business, what are your top priorities? What distractions and 'noise' can you cut out
• Schedule time in for important tasks, this might be bite sized chunks throughout a particular timeframe to help you develop ideas fully and help keep momentum
• Stop multitasking - multitasking is a myth. Our brains can only focus on one thing at a time, so work out what deserves your focus and what doesn't

You need to surround yourself with people who provide healthy challenge. How often do you get a different perspective?

Winston Churchill was alert to the dangers of groupthink. He set up a special department that was able to provide him with a well balanced perspective who were not afraid to offer an opposing opinion and were free to be critical where necessary. This helped Churchill to tackle problems with a well balanced view and ultimately come out with a well thought out solution to a problem.

2. Tech and insights

Unless you are an accountant like me, you are unlikely to find the financial side of your business fun. More likely it is that necessary evil that you need to contend with. Naturally you want to be able to focus on the areas of the business you know and enjoy the most.

As James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits ‘We don’t rise to our highest goals, we fall to the level of our most broken systems’.

Finances can become more complex the more a business grows which can start to feel overwhelming. Market conditions are continually changing so it’s crucial to have robust systems in place that will provide you with a strong grasp of the financials that are the foundation of your business. Having the right systems in place help to:

• Understand business performance inside and out
• Provide you with real time data and insights to help make better decisions and drive performance
• Manage cashflow – as we all know, cash is the lifeblood of a business, so managing this is crucial especially as your business expands

3. Hiring talent

Having the right team in place can be a competitive advantage and can be a stumbling block for growth.

If your business is scaling up you need the right team in place to support you. Acquiring the right talent is a top priority for ambitious, forward focussed organisations. This doesn’t stop with recruitment, it is important to create a culture for engaging and retaining your team.

Creating a growth culture rather than a performance based one can help (Harvard Business Review did a great article on this).

• Enabling people to have the psychological safety do their best work.
• Supporting continuous learning through enquiry, curiosity and transparency.
• Providing feedback across the organisation that is grounded in a shared vision and commitment to the business and each other.

With a war for talent finding the right candidates can be tricky, another option can be to partner with trusted teams and tap into the talent that outsourced teams are able to provide.

Running a business is not easy (I suspect you worked that out quickly) and there are always new challenges and demands that you will face. Business growth is exciting but it is important that it is managed well. Having an experienced accounting team that support you is crucial to any company’s success.

BDO have worked with lots of businesses providing them with the support they need using our client centric approach throughout the continuum of growth, whether it is using proven technology to deliver the right solutions through to helping businesses to achieve significant investment. Download our report and our ebook here

We are always keen to speak with Ambitious Entrepreneurs, so if you would like to discover how we could help your business to achieve it’s strategic ambition, get in touch here