Entrepreneurs report that growing a business is often scarier than starting one, but growth doesn’t have to be an insurmountable risk that remains elusive. Entrepreneurs and business advisors give us their top tips to help you take your company to the next level.
1 Be clear about your plans
Dominic Adams is the operations director at digital marketing agency Prodo, which has more than doubled in size in the past five years. “Have clear and simple plans for growth and communicate,” he says. “Don’t assume that everyone understands where you are going or how it will affect them. Think about roles and responsibilities and communicate to existing and new employees: establish a vision and bring people with you.”
2 Speak directly to clients and suppliers
Quentin Le Pape is the CEO of MOBKOI, a mobile marketing agency he co-founded with his brother just over two years ago aged 26. For him, growth is the most exciting part of running a business and thanks to their enthusiastic and hardworking approach, they’ve managed to secure clients including Canon, Bentley and Mulberry.
A key part of their growth strategy has involved speaking directly to the people they deal with on a daily basis, rather than relying on abstract data or focus groups. “We ask our clients and suppliers what they want,” says Le Pape. “This allows us to work on a scalable solution that ticks all the boxes for all parties involved. Often many companies try to build a business based on market research, numbers or trends and miss out the point; the best way to understand someone’s needs is to ask them directly.”
3 Provide the best customer service you possibly can
Sanj Bhayro is the key small business advisor for global CRM provider Salesforce and advises SMEs on how they can use data management to increase client acquisition and to manage their growth. He has found that customers are becoming more and more demanding when it comes to what they expect from their suppliers. Small businesses need to combat this by fully understanding their customers, so they can compete with their sector’s big players.
Bhayro works with London-based online styling service Enclothed, who have increased their turnover tenfold in the past two years. “They needed to decrease the number of returns they received in order to grow the business, so they took all the data available to them – [gleaned] from customer feedback to external factors such as social media data – in order to build a detailed profile of each customer. That’s how they’ve been able to build a really personalised service and hit their key target of reducing returns rates, which has been key to their amazing growth.”
4 Hone your social media strategy
Sean McNicholas is the founder of Project M, a startup games studio based in east London. He recognised early on that social media would be a key element of customer acquisition. “From an early stage we recruited a social media and community manager to start building the brand on all social platforms. We wanted to let the world know we were here and that there was something new and exciting coming. We could only do this by having a social media expert on board,” he says.
5 Start hiring as soon as possible
Entrepreneurs often struggle to begin hiring, either because they’re worried about the expense or because they want to retain complete control of their business, but MOBKOI was keen to begin hiring fast. “Whenever there’s a resource needed, be confident in taking that step to hire more talent – it could be the game-changer to push your business into a whole new level of success,” says Le Pape.
6 Know what you need from your team
While it may be a particular skill or talent you’re after in an employee, sometimes it’s just as valuable to hire based on personality. MOBKOI place a lot of value on team culture, and therefore hire people who are going to work well together, rather than in a competitive, hierarchical structure.
It’s also important to understand how you need your staff to work. For McNicholas, for example, it became clear that it was crucial for everyone to be in the same room, living and breathing the project. “When we first started Project M, there were only four of us and we all worked remotely. Even when we moved into our first office in Shoreditch’s Tech Hub, the guys were not in every day as some were not based in London. I can see now that our initial structure was not the most productive nor efficient, especially for a startup,” he says.
7 Stay on top of cashflow
When Le Pape started growing MOBKOI, he didn’t look to raise any capital, but quickly the gap that often exists between client and supplier payments became apparent. “It’s inevitable that at times your suppliers will need to be paid before your clients have paid and, if you want to keep your reputation as a trusted business partner, you have to take a hit,” he says.
Mark Thomas is a director at invoice finance company C2FO and works with small business owners who struggle to meet their growth ambitions due to late payments. It’s something most entrepreneurs will encounter, but the scale of the problem can be staggering: “At any one time globally there’s $40tr of invoices outstanding,” Thomas says. “In the UK suppliers aren’t getting paid for 60-70 days after providing goods or services to their buyers. In a recent survey we found that more than 70% of small businesses would use this capital to grow.”
Small businesses have a number of options available to them, from traditional invoice finance, to loans based on the invoice value, but Thomas encourages SMEs to look into “dynamic discounting”, which encourages discounts for early payments. Such simple, innovative ideas can free up much needed cash.
8 Use the internet to get noticed
Vaughan Rowell is the founder of Vend, a startup which creates point-of-sale (POS) technology to bring old-school cash registers into the 21st century and make live easier for sales teams in retail. He built the software in his garage in New Zealand and had grown by 1,100% within three years. They now have software in more than 15,000 stores and employ hundreds of people across the world.
He says: “When you’re starting out, one of the biggest challenges is a lack of budget and resources, but on the internet nobody knows you’re pretending to be a little more global than you already are – unless someone else tells them. From the beginning we’ve worked closely with fantastic customers in different markets who love using the product, to tell their stories and the Vend story online. Their experiences gave us credibility, and then we invested in clever SEO specialists and channels like our blog to spread their message and boost our visibility online.”
9 Get creative with content marketing
“Sometimes all you need is interesting online content that can span geographies to make a dent,” says Rowell. “Content was, and still is, a huge part of our marketing strategy that spans everything from customer stories and educational guides, to the unexpected, big impact creative and video.
“Early on we worked with a skydiving school customer to film me being thrown out of a plane using our system, showing that we accept payments anywhere. It was cost effective, and watching someone try to sell their product 1,000 metres in the air seemed to appeal to people regardless of geography.”
10 Always have a plan B
Before founding Vend, Rowsell was CTO at a company called Vianet. Unfortunately after spending heavily they were hit by the financial crisis and learned the value of always being prepared.
He says: “More often than not you’re in growth mode, you’re growing the business or investing in the business faster than revenue growth is catching up. But you should always have a plan B, because at some point you may not be able to raise that money. It might be to slow down growth to get yourself into a cash flow positive position. Plan C might be selling part of the business. You need to have all of those plans and keep constantly monitoring them to make sure they’re all achievable.”
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Hiscox, sponsor of the Adventures in Business hub on the Guardian Small Business Network.
