It isn’t that you’ve gotten more inefficient. In fact, you are producing more goods at a faster rate and have vastly improved the quality of your services. The revenue you now earn in a month may even be what it took a year for you to earn in your small business.
Growing Pains
In the growth of any business, there comes a point where the business can’t keep doing things in the same old way. You need to look for new solutions for things that worked well on a smaller scale.
With that in mind, here are four business processes you should think of updating.
- How you manage your payroll.
Doing payroll the same old trusted way may be increasing your costs because of the increasing complexity of the paperwork required for wage payments and statements. The solution is to adopt electronic payroll and wage statement methods. This will allow you to put paperless pay into practice. This will give you many payment options like pay cards and online statements. It will also be easier to manage changes in a variety of departments who have diverse requirements, as well as provide service to employees who have different payment needs.
- How you manage your meetings.
When your business was small, you had fewer business meetings. You probably also had to travel far less often to attend those meetings with partners or clients. Now that your company is growing, there are probably more outside meetings, and frequent travel not only raises your costs but also limits the time you have to work on your own business projects. One solution to this is to opt for video conferencing instead of actually traveling regionally or internationally. Setting up a meeting is as simple as sending recipients a hyperlink and then conducting the meeting via voice, video, and desktop sharing. Your meetings will go just as well, perhaps even better, and this alternative is both simple to use and inexpensive.
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- How you manage your telecommunications.
It can become fairly expensive to have multi-line telephone units. It’s possible to get virtual solutions that offer the same functionality at a lower cost. If your business has more than one location, you may want to consider getting laptop-based softphone software. Since your employees are probably being outfitted with laptops anyway why not add these softphone applications to their portable computers, as well. A softphone is a hybrid word for software telephone. It is an application program that enables users to talk using VoIP, or voice over Internet Protocol. In other words, your employees will be making telephone calls from their computing devices. These applications can be used with a headset and microphone.
- How you manage your technological infrastructure.
If your business is growing rapidly but you are still using an on-premise computer system, then you are paying too much and getting too little for your money. If you’re in this situation, it’s time to migrate to cloud computing. Your users will have a richer experience because they will be able to take full advantage of the latest software through Software as a Service. You don’t have to hire an IT team for maintenance and care of the system because all that is handled by the cloud service provider. You can also scale up your business easily by asking for more system resources and additional services. And your employees can access their work from anywhere at any time. This feature is especially useful if you are outsourcing work and want to give independent contractors limited access to your database as well as enhance collaboration.
It’s Not the Same Old Business Anymore
Size makes a huge difference in business operations because you’re now dealing with far more complexity. For instance, your hiring process has probably changed beyond recognition. It used to be easy to hire new people when you had a vacancy. A few well-placed ads were all you needed to get a large selection of candidates and it was not long before you got some more people on board. Now, however, you have so many positions to fill more often that you need a much more sophisticated recruiting system to keep track of everything.
When you have a larger business, you have more employees doing more things, more business processes, more projects to coordinate, and more vendors to manage. You also have more products to sell and more services to offer. Besides having a lot more customers, you may even have several target audiences now because you’ve entered several niches in the same industry.
The bigger your business gets, the more different it becomes. In fact, it may be so different that it’s just a question of semantics to say that you have the same business. In reality, you have a different business, a bigger, more complex business that does more things with more resources to produce bigger results. By using the right solutions, you can prevent complexity from tipping into chaos.