Growing Your Business without Growing Pains

Published 5 August 8 3:33 PM | Aaron

growing plant

Every small business owner, every entrepreneur who's ever taken the plunge to launch his own startup, and every entrepreneurial hopeful has dreamed of reaching that day when his or her business finally "takes off." It's that day when you finally start hit that monthly sales goal, or that day when the demand for your product is growing so quickly that you're struggling to fill it.

And that's when growing pains hit your business. The demands on your business start to rapidly outgrow your organization, and then you're stuck in a position where you forced to slap band-aids on everything without being able to consider the implications on your long-term growth.

The good news is that some growing pains are avoidable, so long as you properly prepare your organization for growth.

Preparing for Growth

What do you need in order to prepare for growth? Ideally, you need to establish the following things in your organization:

  • Predictable Results - you need to know that if two different people in your organization do the same thing, like processing a new order, the results will be the same. If you can't guarantee that the outcomes will be predictably similar then your organization may experience a lot of additional overhead due to the liabilities associated with unpredictability.
  • Standardized Quality of Output - you need to know that the quality of your output will be roughly similar across your organization. Imagine if you had an assembly line for manufacturing automobiles and no one would know if you were producing lemons or masterpieces until the vehicles hit market - it'd be a disaster. Well, what applies to a big auto manufacturer also applies to smaller organizations - you need to have predictable outcomes and a standardized quality of results in order to achieve scalability.
  • Standardized Training Routines - you need to able to expand your human resources in an organized, routine fashion. The most important HR factor, aside from making good hiring decisions, is having a standard set of instruction to offer new employees. This is essential to creating both predictable outcome and standardized quality of output.
  • Clearly Established Roles - roles are essential to growing your company; one person can have multiple roles, but it is important that you lay out a roadmap for all of the roles that are going to need to be filled as your company expands. Roles are simply a collection of assigned responsibilities and expectations, and these are necessary for establishing accountability throughout any organization.

How do you install all of these traits into your organization? The short answer is "by defining roles and processes for each aspect of your business" and we're going to cover this subject in more detail over the course of August.

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Comments

# James L.Walsh said on August 12, 2008 12:41 PM:

A good article, I like the use of the word 'similar' instead of 'exactly the same' this is more human than

the 'automated' predictablity.

From experience 'Clearly Established Roles' is very important especially from the start. It is difficult to get the 'nag' to move to the other course in the middle of the race. If change has to occur as it might then all should be involved.

# EdR017 said on August 12, 2008 11:12 PM:

This stuff is wonderful - if you are in manufacturing, accounting, or anything that has tangible outcomes.

What about pure service - as with public relations, communications, advertising, etc?

I have yet to find a way to quantify, measure, track and faultlessly duplicate these processes.

# dddddd said on August 13, 2008 2:50 AM:

we want some diagram, now! :)

# Richard Shacklock said on August 13, 2008 2:52 AM:

I agree that it is a sound article. Without getting ahead of the next article, I would add that the very nature of a new enterprise is dynamic and flexible in order to be competitive, so established roles are difficult as multi tasking is necessary. Although people can have multiple roles, which role takes preference in a conflict time, which is quite often, during rapid growth?

I look forward to the follow on.

# JeanelleH725 said on August 13, 2008 12:16 PM:

Multi tasking is very important. But, TEAM work is where you want to be.  Doing conflict time is when you come together to solve the proble that is at hand. Conflict in a small business is something that should be shared.

# Paramount Learning Ltd said on August 15, 2008 8:40 AM:

Thanks for this mini article on business growth and why organisations need procedures. When I originally bought smartdraw I never really expected to receive such interesting and useful newsletters. I must say how pleased I am to receive these regular updates providing insight into how to get the most from your product and learn new ideas at the same time.

I regularly use smartdraw as a trainer to create visually appealing graphics to illustrate ideas and concepts in sales and business growth. I find your articles very useful in generating new information on how smartdraw can be used to convey messages clearly and concisely.

I use the program in many ways. I often use the mind map and process flow diagrams to help organisations quantify and streamline processes improving their productivity, sales and business performance. I am very much looking forward to the next article in this series.

Thanks once again for the informative news letters.

Peter

# Aaron said on August 15, 2008 8:42 AM:

"What about pure service - as with public relations, communications, advertising, etc?

I have yet to find a way to quantify, measure, track and faultlessly duplicate these processes."

Ed, I think that this is a great question. In some areas it's harder than others to measure - for instance, how do you measure the quality of output for a major website update? We have a negative measurement system for that - perfect quality would be if the website was updated successfully with no service interruptions to our visitors and each additional visitor who lost service during the course of an update would represent a measurable downgrade in the quality.

We've developed a very robust process for updating our website thus we've almost eliminated downtime entirely; next week we'll be running a screencast which showcases three processes we've used to make our own operations more efficient, our website update process being one of them.

# David Taboada said on August 18, 2008 6:53 AM:

Thanks for sharing this list. I would just add that while doing all this things, try to automate as much as possible. Technology enable business processes are more predictable and produce standarized quality output more often than the average person.

# Jonathan Wutawunashe said on August 21, 2008 11:03 AM:

Well done! These articles offer solid, practical and implementable advice, and associating the SmartDraw brand with sound business advice is a stroke of genius! Again, well done!

# Working Smarter said on October 14, 2008 9:57 AM:

Last week I wrote about what businesses need in order to grow without the growing pains . In those posts

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