Avoid these issues when growing your business

Here at Autus, we’re all about growth. I mean it’s literally our name (Autus is Latin for growth!), so we know a thing or two about it. Growing a business comes with a variety of different challenges, especially when the focus is on scaling a business up. The good news is that you can avoid some of these challenges as long as you watch out for them and take some of our advice on how to prevent them!
Not enough planning
We’ve all been here, you’ve got a new product or service you want to launch but as you get closer and closer to the deadline, it’s clear that it hasn’t been thought out enough and some key details are missing. If you’re asking questions about your own plan and you don’t know the answers, chances are that you’ve not planned it out enough.
The best way to avoid a lack of planning is to almost over-plan in your planning stage! This sounds like an obvious answer, but you’d be surprised how many businesses get excited and end up going ahead with plans far too early into their inception. It’s better to have to wait a little while longer for a better pay off than to put plans into action too early and risk them falling apart at a huge expense to your business, setting your goals for growth back significantly.
Poor market research
Even as gurus in the digital marketing and automation space, we still like to carry out our own industry research. The risk in not doing this is far higher than the risk in spending a few minutes or hours of your time making sure the facts you know still hold true. Not putting in enough research, looking at unreliable resources, neglecting reliable information or just not putting in the work at all, can seriously damage your business’ plans for growth. It can lead you to spend too much money on an area that is not at all profitable or, worse, it can seriously damage your business’ reputation as a knowledgeable source on your industry.
To prevent this, make sure to research as much as possible before going ahead with anything. Think to yourself; “Am I sure that this information is still, correct? How long has it been since that information was published? Are there any other sources of information that back up or disagree with this particular source?”. Asking yourself these questions is a great start to beginning research, especially if it’s been a while since the last time, you did anything research related. Make sure to protect your business’ interests and reputation, don’t skimp on your research period!
Quality of work degrades over time
As a small team expands and gets bigger, it’s only natural that some people won’t learn as fast as others and some of the work produced won’t be up to standards. The danger in this is when it’s not regulated and continues to slip over time. Regulating a bigger team than you’re used to can be difficult and time consuming but is necessary to prevent the quality of work slipping and degrading your business’ reputation.
Preventing this one is easier said than done but not impossible in the slightest. You have to make the development of new team members a priority and regularly check in with them during their development. This hands-on approach guarantees that you get exactly what you need from your employees and makes them want to work harder to achieve their own goals and the business’ goals.
Inadequate or unscalable processes
This is one which we see a lot. Often when companies start to expand their team from a one- or two-person operation to even a team of three or four people the processes in place either aren’t adequate for a bigger team or don’t exist at all. How do you share customer information with the entire team? A spreadsheet that gets updated once a year? This problem is made worse when the number of customers you start to take on becomes more than you can deal with using the systems you currently have in place.
To fix this issue, we highly recommend implementing a CRM system into your business’ operations. We use a CRM to keep track of our customers’ information, from basic things such as their name, email address, phone number, website to more details such as meetings we have coming up, tasks to carry out for them and their preferences for services we offer. It’s a pretty amazing system that really allows you to hone in the details of your customers and the services you offer them. It’s also massively helpful for aligning your team. In a meeting and can’t tell Johnny the apprentice the email address of that prospect they need to email? Just get them to check the CRM!
If you’re looking to grow and scale your business, we can’t recommend enough that you seriously consider investing in a CRM, Marketing and Sales Automation platform. Being able to run all these processes from one system reduces clutter, aligns your entire team and makes brining in a profit a much more achievable task.
At Autus, we’re experts in all things CRM, Marketing and Sales automation, and Marketing strategy. Why not get our free Marketing Automation comparison guide below 👇
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
