‍Want to Grow Your Business? Overcome These 5 Challenges!

Starting a business in Florida is a significant achievement for many entrepreneurs, but the real challenge lies in achieving consistent, sustainable growth.  

Our internet marketing company in Florida just acquired a patient retention marketing company based in Tennessee. This has been a tremendous experience, which has us thinking about both the triumphs and the potential pitfalls involved in growth.

Expansion can lead to new experiences and various opportunities, but it can also bring about all sorts of obstacles that are tricky to navigate.  

In this article, we are going to share with you what these obstacles are and how to deal with them so your business will thrive in the years to come.  

Top 5 Challenges of Growing a Small Business

1. Growing Your Workforce and Recruiting the Right Talents

One of the first challenges you’re going to face when growing your business is hiring more people to accommodate the additional work-related expansion.  

You can’t just hire anybody. You need to employ the right people who share the same values and are aligned with your company culture. They will keep your business running and guarantee the same quality output that you are known for.  

Having a great company culture is the first step toward hiring the right people and keeping the best ones.  

As your go-to internet marketing company in Florida, we recommend that you develop a hiring process that helps build your company culture.

• Define your company's core values to help applicants gauge if they’re a good fit for your organization.  
• Factor performance standards into your core value system to create clear expectations. Good company culture isn't just about being nice to each other, it’s also about encouraging high performance.  

• Create a compelling job ad that clearly communicates your company culture and performance expectations.  
• Use personality assessments to learn more about your candidates.  
• Make an offer, and finish off by following effective onboarding practices.

2. Managing a Healthy Cash Flow

When you expand your business, your bills, payroll, and other payables to your suppliers will naturally increase. This means you need to manage your cash flow well to make sure you have enough money at the end of each month to cover all of your operating expenses.  

Here are some tips on how to maintain a healthy cash flow in your business:

• Identify business risks and include that in your cash-flow budgeting. Consider many possible scenarios like order cancellations, losing a major client, and dealing with a non-paying client. Come up with a backup plan in case these things happen so you're prepared.  
• Create a separate bank account for your business. Never mix business and personal bank accounts. Always pay business-related purchases using your company account.  
• Analyze your inventory movement to identify fast-moving items and products that are soaking up your capital. Put your slow-moving items on sale and stock up more on products that sell fast.  
• Set aside three months’ worth of expenses in the bank to serve as buffer money.  

• Ask your customers for a down payment and bill them earlier to give them enough time to settle their payment before its actual due date. It’s important to implement a better system to manage your cash flow more efficiently.  
• Assess your business expenses and try to eliminate them where possible.  
• Find ways to increase your cash flow.  

3. Getting the Results You Need

If you double your headcount and spending, you’re supposed to at least see a double in your results too, yes?  

If your company is not as productive as it's supposed to be given the increase in resources, take a step back, and assess what's wrong.  

What has stalled your results? Has your team’s productivity decreased? Is the company spending way too much cash? Is the onboarding process taking way too much time?

Identify the real issue so you know how to pivot your strategy and move forward.  

When growing your business, it’s best to scale slowly. Making gradual improvements and investments allows you to keep a pulse on core financial metrics and which areas of your organization need work.  

Hiring lots of people and making major changes all at once can disrupt your team’s flow, impacting their output.  

4. Using the Right Tools

Growing your company may require you to invest in new tech to better serve your organization and your customers.  

Assess your cloud-based file sharing plan, project management software, financial system, and other tech stacks before scaling your business. Identify if they can still offer what you need as you grow and replace what needs to be changed.  

If you can upgrade these techs to accommodate a more complex workload, this is good news because it means you won't have to spend money on a new system.  

But if switching to another provider is the only option, it’s best to make this decision early to save time and money in the long run.  

Here are three essential operational tech solutions for growing companies:

• Chatbots – When your customer base grows, your customer service must grow with it. Using a chatbot allows you to respond to your customers right away and provide them the instant support they expect from you.  
• Enterprise resource planning software – As your business begins to grow, basic record-keeping solutions will no longer be enough to manage and organize all the different information from various departments. To accommodate the needs of your growing business, you should have software that will automate and streamline your operations so you and your team can better manage increased volumes of business.
• Customer relationship management – Your customers are your company’s lifeline, so you need to maintain good relationships with them. A huge customer base makes this difficult to do without a central system where you can monitor, organize, and measure all touchpoints of your customer relationships.  

5. Keeping Pace with Customer Demands

Nowadays, it’s easy for customers to find alternatives for nearly any vendor. To keep your customers loyal and prevent them from switching, you need to continually do your market research to stay on top of trends and behaviors.  

You need to figure out and truly understand what your customers want, how they behave, and which marketing tactics they respond to.  

Here are the top 5 emerging marketing trends that you need to know:

• More creators will be doing various brand ambassador roles. This will help companies build more authentic connections with their audience.  
• The customer-centered shopping experience is a must for winning over our customers. Modern consumers want a more immersive, interactive, and highly-tailored experience from brands.  

• Interactive content is going to be in-demand as consumers become more independent in their journey toward making a purchase. Your goal is to make it easier for them to find what they're looking for.  
• VR-based software is going to provide customers with more immersive and engaging brand experiences.
• Conversational commerce is growing in importance, due to both voice search and the proliferation of chat apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat.

As an internet marketing company in Florida that works with hundreds of small businesses nationwide, we know that business conditions change all the time, just like consumer behavior.

You need access to real-time data to stay updated with trends and make the best business decisions for your company. This is the key to staying ahead of your competitors!

Are You Planning to Scale Your Business?

Scaling your business is no easy task. But, by knowing the common pitfalls coming your way, being prepared, and taking it slowly, we believe your transition will be a smooth and successful one!

Digital Resource is an internet marketing company in Florida that specializes in helping small businesses get more customers and sales online. If this is exactly what you need to continue growing your business, we’re the right digital marketing agency to call!  

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