Grow or stay small?

Many businesses face a growth dilemma. They don’t know whether to increase their risk and grow their business or keep it very small.

If you don’t want to grow your business, don’t worry. You’re probably in a big majority! Many small businesses don’t want to grow because they want their business to fit in with their life goals.

On the other hand, there are businesses who really want to grow but simply don’t know how to expand. These businesses therefore avoid growth. Sometimes they start to take on employees and up scale their operation, but the stress becomes too much and they pull back. They don’t want to grow at the expense of ruining their family, their relationships and their happiness. This, of course, is totally understandable.

There is a way to grow without costly consequences, though you must be prepared to spend money.

Let’s look firstly at some reasons why people start businesses in the first place.

The start ups
Many home-based businesses are started because the humdrum of employee life is too rushed and impersonal. Mums want to pick up their children from school, dads want to be there at special moments in their children’s lives, and their skill set permits them to trade in a job for a business. Some are forced into re-inventing themselves because they’re shown the door or made redundant, while others leave their job before the inevitable happens.

Often the amount of money needed to make a business work is set in relation to what someone has earned in their former job. So, if someone was on $60,000 as an employee, a home-based business bringing in the same amount or a little bit more, with some of the tax deductions of running a business, can make the switch to self-employment an alternative.

Many of these people just want to keep their business as a one person band and have no desire to do any more work than what they do. And that’s fine. However, anyone choosing to stay very small should make the commitment to start working smarter so they won’t have to work longer.

The fast growers
Now let’s look at those who need to do something in terms of growth. These people start a business and they’re so good at what they do and their customers love them so much that before they know it they have more work than they can handle.

If you have so much work coming in that you don’t know how to manage it all, this can be a sign of a business that needs to work out its direction.

Many business owners just go along for the ride. They know that the really good times could be followed by bad times and so they feel they have to take on the additional work to keep them going when times are slow. More often than not however the excess workload starts to get too much and the business owner is left stressed and sleepless.

What happens ultimately is a choice — do I want to grow or not?
Growth brings challenges like employing people, new costs like workers compensation, superannuation, etc and it means more time and government red tape to deal with. It can also mean the cost of external premises.

You need to work out if you want to get bigger. If your decision is that you do want to grow, then you need to work out a growth plan.

How do you do it? You need to start investing in your business – this means increasing your risk and spending money to bring in the resources to help you through the growing pains. In essence, you have to stop doing all the jobs yourself and start letting go.

It’s good to use an expert in areas like bookkeeping. The time you spend in an area where you’re weak steals time away from the business area where you’re strong and where you can make more money. It is really wise to compare hourly rates, say, yours compared to a bookkeeper and then make a decision. The same can be done with a cleaner, administration person and eventually, a manager. It all comes down to working smarter.

How do you work smarter?
Working smarter and allocating your time more effectively means you find time to work on your business instead of working in your business.

How do you make the transition?
The transition from a managed business to a fast grower is made easier by your commitment to innovation, which means you work smarter.

Ignoring time-saving technology and better business techniques could make your life a whole lot tougher than it has to be. It could also unfairly steal the time you might be desperate to save.