Our experts share their advice for achieving sustainable long term growth.
If your business is growing, keep it going! Our small business finance experts offer their top strategies for keeping small business growth sustainable and substantial, plus provide insights into the challenges of growth.
Congratulations! If you’re reading this, it likely means your small business is growing against the odds and statistics. A combination of hard work, persistence, perseverance, and sweat equity has your business headed in the right direction.
However, you may be asking yourself more than ever: how do I keep this going?
While you have worked towards this result for years, it can be challenging to know how to continue your expansion and ensure it’s sustainable; plenty of businesses have experienced wild growth only to fail or struggle, like Peleton and Polaroid.
Luckily, we’re here with solutions and good news, proven strategies that have helped hundreds of other small business owners not just manage their growth, but reach new levels of success.
But first, let’s explore what’s so challenging about growth, including its toll on the business owner, so we can understand the solutions.
Everyone wants growth, but not everyone knows what to do once they achieve it.
A major obstacle to lasting growth is that it requires a business owner to pivot to new roles and skills. No longer are you answering the phone, filling in for sick employees, or handling day-to-day tasks that have made your business a success so far, you now focus on tasks like securing funding, navigating complicated (and larger) finances, or finding and retaining staff. You begin stepping into roles and responsibilities where you have limited knowledge or expertise.
It also means that your processes are under more pressure.
Pen-and-paper policies, static spreadsheets, and employees informally training each other simply don’t hold up when there is considerably more complexity and volume. While the first 5 years of your business required an hour or two of bookkeeping each week, this may now be a full-time commitment, for example. If you’re not careful, simple processes can become a major bottleneck, or break entirely and cause major issues.
Your revenue growth has most likely been driven by good marketing, customer satisfaction, and word of mouth promotion. But the bigger your business grows, the more complicated the marketing and customer experience efforts will become; you become a larger target for negative reviews or competitors trying to take over your well-earned SEO rankings, for example. Effective digital marketing becomes not a nice-to-have, but a must-have in order to fund innovation and expansion investments.
Finally, as the business owner, growth can be mentally, emotionally, and physically tiring.
You’ve gone from an owner/operator to a quasi-C-Suite role, relied upon by employees, vendors, and customers. Your time is more valuable than ever and the stakes feel higher as you invest more time, energy, and risk into the business. Many business owners report feeling lonely, unable to relate to or freely communicate with their employees—or friends and family who don’t share their experience.
Luckily, just as we promised, there are solutions for all of this.
After helping thousands of small business owners go from six- to seven- to eight-figure revenue, our accountants, virtual CFOs, and bookkeepers know what it takes to keep growth going. While there is much to do at this stage, these 5 strategies are a great foundation for further expansion.
If there’s one place to focus first, it’s scalability. Ensuring your business is scalable, meaning its ability to respond to changes and adapt to evolving demands, is paramount because it means that, whether your business grows by 10x or 100x, the processes, tools, systems, and team will respond accordingly.
For example, imagine your finances are handled within a single Excel spreadsheet. Years of financial data are within one document, saved on your laptop, and it's difficult for others to access. This is an example of a non-scalable business practice; it’s a relatively simple tool with limited access.
However, a scalable financial operation would involve cloud-based technology, allowing others to have access and ensure the data is never lost. It would be used by finance experts, not an overworked and busy business owner. By having a team you can rely on to handle everything from your bookkeeping to accounting to tax strategy and even high-level finance strategies will ensure your finances don’t hit a bottleneck and hold you back.
Plus, when the unexpected occurs, like an IRS tax audit, you’ll have others to rely on while you run the business.
If you want to keep the revenue rolling in, you cannot neglect marketing.
It’s what keeps your business top-of-mind, nurtures interested people into customers, and attracts customers across digital and traditional channels. As you grow, ensuring your packaging and branding, digital marketing, customer support, and more are dialed in will be crucial to success.
But don’t just focus on marketing to new customers. It’s more cost-effective to focus on delighting and retaining your current customers, especially since they’re more likely than anyone else to buy again. Introduce rewards or referral programs, effective email nurture campaigns, and make the customer experience top-notch to keep your customers buying.
Plus, our tax strategists think you should know: many advertising and marketing expenses are tax deductible, making these revenue-drivers an even better deal.
A growing business usually means the amount of money coming in is greater than ever. Conversely, the expenses are bigger and more frequent, too. Ensuring you not only have enough money, but enough cash at the right time, becomes a greater challenge as you manage cash flow.
It’s not just that it’s difficult to manage; it’s that the consequences of poor cash flow will quickly put you in a reactive mode. You’ll waste time negotiating extensions with vendors, lose out on preferable terms, put expenses on high-interest credit cards, and perhaps even explain to employees why their paychecks bounced. Plus, it’s stressful.
As your organization matures, cash flow will become a major part of your business finances, which is where the value of a dedicated bookkeeper becomes invaluable and, for more complex cash flow planning, a fractional CFO.
A growing business cannot succeed without a team of skilled, trusted, and consistent employees. Team members who not only get the job done, but bring new ideas, solutions, and reliability to a workplace, are invaluable.
However, employee retention is difficult as employers compete for a limited labor pool and employee requirements evolve.
Business owners and entrepreneurs need to make their organization attractive to employees, becoming a workplace that brings the best talent and keeps them long-term.
The alternative is a revolving door of employees who are never fully trained, don’t contribute much value, and bring significant costs, like repeating training and recruiting expenses. Plus, with too-short tenure, you lose the opportunity to grow and develop future company leaders. The ramifications can last for years.
In addition to competitive salaries, flexible work locations, and room for advancement, employee benefits help build long-lasting teams. Not only do perks like health insurance, maternity/paternity leave, tuition reimbursement, and ongoing education support make your company attractive, they offer a surprising benefit: many employee benefits are tax-deductible.
A tax expert can help you determine which ones offer the most value to your business so you can build a great team—and increase your tax savings.
It’s lonely at the top, particularly for successful business owners who may hesitate to have honest financial discussions with employees or family members. Success can feel isolating, even if it’s well-earned.
One proven solution: having a finance expert you can rely on, one whose expertise and knowledge propels your business.
It’s not only a smart financial decision, giving you access to diverse expertise, it’s also a brilliant way to have a safe audience for the ups and downs of business ownership, plus someone who can openly talk numbers.
This is one of the many reasons our Virtual CFOs partner with successful small business owners; they’re an advisor and strategist for company financials, plus a helpful sounding board for entrepreneurs and founders who want to feel supported.
While these 5 strategies can help any business, your business has its own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And that’s where our tax and finance professionals can really bring value, giving you a personalized approach to your finances.
Schedule a call now with our team to start exploring solutions designed specifically for your business and needs.
National Business Development & Sales Manager
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