1 – Not employing the right people
However, you decide to recruit, putting the time in to plan the type of person you need and their potential career path is worth it. The cost of hiring the wrong person and then needing to recruit again is not just one of time and money.
Hiring a team with a different skill set to yours is invaluable as it allows you to delegate tasks outside of your unique abilities, to keep you focussed on driving growth. Allowing your team to progress their career within your business and rewarding staff with bonuses also helps to retain focus on shared goals.
2 – Not effectively managing cash flow
Growing a business and managing a cash flow go hand in hand. Late payments and billing disputes can be an even bigger problem, when you factor in additional costs to fund growth. Banks may be able to help with overdrafts for working capital but you need to arrange this in advance. Direct debit can help with late payments. Detailed cash flow forecasts can help to highlight any issues before they affect your business.
3 – Not having a marketing plan
How many of us have our own marketing department? Many small businesses will start with a marketing budget to get the business off the ground then consider new campaigns in quiet times, anticipating instant results.
Understanding your potential customer base and their changing requirements is important, to ensure you continue to meet them and don’t miss out on additional opportunities. Promoting your unique selling points and effective communication with customers across multiple platforms on and offline on a regular basis is key.
4 – No focus on scalability
We are often so focussed on delivering excellence to our customers that the scalability of our own internal IT and telephony can get overlooked. Hiring new staff may lead to new office space being required. How easy is it to move your telephone system and add additional extensions? Are there limits on any of your internal billing or CRM systems? Making sure all systems can scale up effectively as well as streamlining and automating tasks where appropriate is essential.
5 – Not monitoring performance
You may have a plan for growth but if you don’t regularly measure against it how do you know if you are on-track to achieve plan? Often communicating the plan to the whole team gets overlooked. Having departmental targets and individual KPIs linked to the growth plan is useful. Reporting against plan weekly and monthly can help to understand where the gaps are and what needs to be done to get back on-track.
The Jola team have been supporting business growth in the voice and data channel for over twenty years. We help partners find opportunities for additional recurring revenue streams within their existing bases. We also help partners to upgrade their own telephony systems with additional handsets to plug in and demonstrate at customer meetings.
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