Growing Pains: 7 Ways to Manage Small Business Growth

Do you have a business growth strategy? While most of us welcome explosive business growth, you may not be ready for the growing pains that accompany it. Turning a small business into a bigger one is never easy.

Once your small business starts to grow rapidly, you may find yourself trying to keep up.

While business growth often comes unexpectedly, there are a few ways to prepare for it. So, here are seven tips from entrepreneurs who have coped with and managed explosive business growth.

1. Measure everything.

Measure your efforts, conversion rates, and sales. These simple steps have helped us prepare and cope with explosive growth. In addition, speculating when certain trends are coming will help any business prepare for the future.

Mohammad Anwar, President at Softway Solutions: @SoftwaySolution

2. Be open for opportunity.

There’s much debate regarding how much you should listen to your customers. Whether you agree with that doctrine or not, part of being an entrepreneur is keeping your eyes and ears open for opportunity. We were open to new opportunities, took insight from our customers and ran with it.

Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder at CloudFlare: @CloudFlare

3. Keep adapting.  

When your managing business growth, it is important to continually tweak your strategy. Always seek feedback for improvement and innovation. Market feedback is crucial and will determine your next move, so be open minded.

Lindsey Port, Founder at GLO Gaming: @IntheGlo

4. Focus on building the right culture.

One of our first key initiatives at the start of our growth phase was to develop a set of core values. Those values were selected and refined by our employees to guide our decisions in coming years.  We now hire based on these core values and look to them to ensure the decisions we make are in line with the entrepreneurial spirit that have helped us succeed so far.

Andrew Sieja, Founder & CEO at kCura: @kCuraCorp

5. Trust your instincts.

Surround yourself with experienced and talented people. Rely on their expertise instead of trying to “recreate the wheel.” But, it’s a delicate balance between the former and learning to trust your own intuition. I have found, on more than one occasion, if your gut keeps telling you something there’s a reason for it.

Jay Howard, President & CEO at I.O. Metro: @IOMetro

6. Take it one step at a time.

There is always more to be done. The only thing you can do is take things one step at a time. We promote a culture of constant improvement. I’ve found that rapid growth makes problem areas stick out like a sore thumb. Fortunately, we’ve never encountered a growing pain that crippled our company, but we have been forced to pour all of our resources into strengthening processes that enable us to scale.

Rich Enos, Founder at StudyPoint: @StudyPoint

7. Maintain your standards.

Always stick with the fundamental business principles you used to build your company. Sacrificing your values will hurt the long-term sustainability of your company. There are many dangers associated with fast, small business growth strategies. Two of the most important ones include your ability to maintain the overall quality of your product or service and the customer service experience.

Andrew Schrage, CEO & Editor-in-Chief at Money Crashers: @MoneyCrashers

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