What entrepreneur doesn’t want to grow their business? Or even better, get 10x more customers overnight. But ask yourself, is your business ready to handle so many customers so suddenly?
The main goal of almost any marketing strategy is gaining more business. Serving more people, however, doesn’t just mean having more revenue. It also means more effort, more delegation, and a host of other challenges.
The rapid growth stage is both one of the most exciting and most demanding times for a business. It’s normal for companies to experience growing pains, particularly with accelerated growth. To reduce these pains, you need to think beyond your growth marketing strategy and plan for what happens next.
Everyone wants to grow, but is your business ready to handle the accelerated growth? Are your foundations right to support 10x growth? What happens when your business gains 10x customers overnight? Will you and your team manage?
Let’s figure it out by starting with what 10x growth means for your business.
What 10x growth means for your business
When we talk about business growth, we’re thinking of growth in linear terms. Growth happens when a company adds new resources, like capital, people, or technology and increases its revenue.
Growth is different from scaling, which is when revenue increases without a substantial increase in resources. The biggest challenge with growth is the number of resources it takes and the changes it brings to a company.
A sign of a resilient business is the ability to adapt to the changing environment and grow quickly. If not adequately prepared for the significant changes that come with growth, things can quickly spiral out of control.
Being prepared means having the below processes in place:
- Operations: Can your operations handle a 10x output?
- Team: Is your team ready in terms of performance ability and attitude?
- Automation: Do you have specific automation processes to manage the growth and take the manual load off your team?
- Roles and responsibilities: Are the various roles and responsibilities clearly defined among your team members?
Unfortunately, sometimes, as quickly as the growth comes in, so do the challenges. To keep your growth momentum going, you need to overcome each challenge that comes your way quickly. You need to be tuned in to your business and know how to handle the growth before it happens.
How to handle 10x growth in your business
Successfully managing your company’s growth takes a proactive approach. Here are a few things to keep in mind during the rapid growth phase:
Set your growth objectives (and align them with strategic goals)
Be strategic about your growth. Don’t just grow. Manage your growth by setting strategic business goals that will help you succeed sustainably and with purpose.
Setting clear objectives will ensure that you’re channeling resources where they are most needed and compelling – whether it’s focusing on markets with more significant growth potential or playing to the strengths and expertise of your staff.
Understand the cause of 10x growth
If your business is experiencing 10x growth, you must be doing something right. It’s essential to pinpoint what it is in your business that incited this growth. What changed your marketing strategy? What changed in your business processes and operations?
Knowing what caused the growth needs to be part of your resilient growth marketing strategy to ensure that your growth is sustainable.
Prioritize and concentrate your efforts
As the business owner, you need to set your priorities ahead of rapid growth. The reality is, you can’t focus on every area of your business at once. While you may see needs everywhere, you won’t make a meaningful impact if you can’t prioritize your time.
From the business perspective, you may need to finetune what you offer. Think of offering less. Focus on the areas that inspire growth rather than spreading your efforts to areas that aren’t contributing to growth.
Continually adapt
You, and your team, need to know how to roll with the punches. A growing customer base means continually adapting to handle the increased workload.
Increased web traffic needs more servers, and larger order volumes may require different suppliers. Plus, a growing team needs bigger office space or more advanced remote team management software. With growth comes many changes, and you’ll need to be ready to adapt again and again.
Choose your team wisely
Rapid growth usually means increased staffing requirements. Before making any new hires, take a step back and critically assess your current staff and whether you can optimize their responsibilities.
When there is a need to hire more employees, make sure that you’re hiring wisely. Your employees have a massive impact on the future of your company. Without a solid team to guide growth, your business will fall flat. So when hiring new team members, make sure that they have a shared vision of the company’s future.
Another way to meet the demand of rapid growth is through outsourcing. It doesn’t require you to hire new employees, which takes time, but still gets the job done.
Don’t forget about your customers
Always make sure that you are listening to your customers and meeting their needs. Their insights can help you improve your products and services, figure out customer service issues, and identify new customer demographics.
Customer experience should continually be at the forefront of your resilient growth marketing strategy. After all, your customers are the reason your business is booming. So keep them happy, and you’ll keep on growing.
Prepare for growth before it happens.
The rapid growth stage of a company can be an extremely volatile environment. So it’s essential to get ready for growth before it happens. That way, you know that you’ll continue to grow sustainably, rather than it crushing your business.
Being prepared for 10x growth starts with getting your foundations right. Get in touch with our team at Insights Lab to find out how we can help you grow your business smarter, faster, and more sustainably.