Your business is finally taking off. You’re moving to an office space and hiring employees. This is exciting, but terrifying. Expansion is what every business owner wants, but it creates new issues, challenges and sometimes even problems. There are several things that an expanding business could take advantage of in order to make growth less stressful.
First of all, start right. Have a vision of the best possible way your business can operate and stay within this vision as much as possible. This will help keep overhead where it needs to be, keep the integrity of the company in tact and allow for growth. When creating this vision, remember that no detail is too small. If you want to be an environmentally conscious office, it’s important to ask yourself key questions, like to what extent you want to be paperless? If not, how will you source your ink and what will the budget be? What light bulbs will you use? Will you make recycling an easy part of the daily office practices?
Secondly, imagine what would happen if you land that whale of a client or suddenly your business receives surprise publicity that causes a giant wave of clients? How will you accommodate the new growth without overspending on what could be a temporary influx? A key here is doing the essentials and starting with inexpensive methods of accommodating the demand.
For example, use temps to help transition through the new demand. And make smart, flexible and cost effective capital expenditures, like using well priced laptops instead of expensive Macbook Pros when they might simply need to do some accounting or simple tasks that any computer can provide. By using laptops, you also allow for the flexibility and mobility of your employees working from home or if you need to rearrange the office.
It’s a common mistake to overspend on equipment that has features and capabilities that are unnecessary for particular work and to buy the equipment at expensive outlets. Especially when you can take advantage of alternatives to expensive computer programs that our out there. Using these tips in combination help you from overspending as you try to meet your business’ demand.
Third, use services like cloud computing to keep your business flexible and secure. By using versatile services it allows your business to continuously expand, move and upgrade without having to maintain, account for and service expensive physical storage devices. This allows your business to stay flexible as it grows or even if it contracts after sudden growth and do so without the sunken cost of physical storage.
Finally, have a plan for your accounting. We no longer need to hire a guy with a visor to scour our daily invoices and expenses, but it is critical that you have a plan and stay consistent with that plan. Using quality accounting software from the beginning can save you headache and expense as your business grows. Don’t merely throw your receipts in a shoe box and hope that an accountant can make sense of them at the end of the year. By using live accounting software, you can keep track of your profits and losses in real time so that you can make important adjustments before it’s too late.
Ultimately, it’s exciting to succeed. But with success comes new responsibilities and challenges. Make sure that you navigate those challenges so that your success can continue. This way, growth won’t become a dreaded word.
