Why You Need to Plan Your Business Growth

Growing a new business is one of the most crucial tasks that must be taken before a startup can be transformed into a sustainable operation. In light of the altering economic conditions, your own personal goals, and the unexpected twists and turns that may arise, you need to prepare for your company's expansion.

Over the course of the past two decades, Brad Krauskopf has been the sole proprietor of each of his various businesses. Since 2011, the establishment of Hub Australia and the management of its expansion have occupied the majority of his focus.

In his role as CEO of Hub Australia, Brad has been responsible for overseeing the company's expansion and development. During this period, the company has implemented the lessons learnt at each new coworking location to improve its operations and raise its scale.

Hub Australia has established itself as one of the main Australian-owned coworking providers, with more than 3,500 members dispersed over its seven locations and a total of seven locations.

The documentation of processes, mapping out the road to each level of scaling, and establishing the appropriate corporate culture are all essential resources that need to be compiled before you can feel confident in your strategy for the expansion of your organisation.

Before you can feel confident in your strategy for the expansion of your organisation, you must first feel confident in your plan.

Scaling your team:

People who are just getting started in business or who run a small firm frequently commit the error of trying to manage all of the work on their own rather than looking to hire more workers. This is a mistake that can be avoided by looking to hire more people.

It's possible that this is due to the expenditures involved, the length of time it takes to recruit and train new personnel, or the philosophy that "if you want something done well, do it yourself."

Putting together a capable team that can carry out the necessary responsibilities and ensure that everything is working as it should be is necessary for a company that wants to become self-sufficient.

When building a new team, it is essential to emphasise the power, methods, and resources of the individuals involved. In many cases, employing professionals is more successful than potentially botching the management of the situation internally.

Accounting and legal must-haves:

If you want to grow your business with outside investors' assistance, you must begin consulting with experts as soon as possible during the startup phase. This is absolutely necessary.

Suppose you fail to get professional assistance and fail to make adequate plans. In that case, you risk missing out on government handouts, being forced to pay penalties, and leaving yourself vulnerable to legal troubles. If money becomes more of a focus for you, you run the risk of not getting professional assistance and failing to make adequate plans.

If the founders of a firm do not have a formal agreement in place prior to the foundation of the company, this is one of the most common mistakes they make. Right from the beginning of the company, it is essential necessary to have a conversation about the company's shareholding structure, roles, milestones, and possible exits.

Growing too quickly:

The process of entering new markets can be time-consuming and expensive; yet, many organisations aim to be competitive on a global scale or expand swiftly. However, the process of entering new markets can be difficult.

Before you can successfully grow your business abroad, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the relevant rules and regulations and a track record of proven success to be confident that your product will be successful in the new market and space.

If you grow more quickly than you are prepared for, you run the risk of being stretched thin financially and in terms of the resources, you have available. If you do not have development plans and a strategy to follow in the event that it occurs, rapid expansion might be a concern for your company, therefore, it is necessary to prepare for it in advance.

In order to get your businesses ready for the expansion of their activities in the future, you may need support from legal and financial professionals as well as a framework. In addition, you will need to establish fallbacks and protections for them.

Tips for improving your business

It is reasonable to assume that as the owner of a firm, you are aware of the areas in which there is an opportunity for development inside your organisation. When business owners want to make improvements to their firms, they aren't always sure where to begin the process of making such changes.

The following is a rundown of some significant steps you need to take to get the ball rolling on the development of your firm.

Assess your situation

Before you start making any changes, it is essential to make certain that you have a complete comprehension of the factors that are influencing the performance of your organisation. This is because making changes can have a significant impact on the success of your business.

The present business procedures you use, the trends in the relevant market, or shifts in the larger environment in which you work could all fall under this category.

The following is a list of tools that can be of assistance to you while conducting an analysis of the present state of your company:

The SWOT analysis is a tool that can aid you in assessing the opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses that are currently confronting your business.

The process of benchmarking enables you to identify the opportunities, risks, strengths, and weaknesses that your company faces.

Conducting study on the market and the industry in which your firm operates in order to identify patterns, shifts, and demands made by customers or clients is the definition of market research.

The purpose of trend analysis is to identify patterns of consistent results or trends by making use of business data that has been accumulated over the course of time.

Webinars, also known as web-based seminars, provide you with access to helpful knowledge that can contribute to the growth of your business skills.

Set clear goals

You are free to make the objectives of your organisation as broad or as narrow as you think is appropriate for the situation. It will be much simpler for you to achieve your goals if you put them into terms that are easy to understand and put those words into writing. Verify that the following are some of your goals:

• precise - Specify exactly what it is that you want to achieve and ensure that everyone understands it.
• quantifiable - Ensure that you have a method that will allow you to evaluate the success of the endeavour.
• realisable - Verify that your objective is something that can be accomplished with the resources you have available to you, including both time and money.
• relevant - Ensure that the accomplishment of your goals will result in an improvement in profit drivers and will improve some facets of your business.
• in a timely manner — Establish a specific termination date for the project.

When you have your objectives outlined in writing, the next step is to prioritise them according to priority so that you can decide which ones to work on first.

Certain of our goals may have to take precedence over others in order to be accomplished. It is necessary that you acknowledge the need to handle certain plans with a long-term strategy because you will not be able to instantly fulfil them due to a lack of resources, funds, or time.

You must also recognise the need to handle certain plans with a long-term approach. In addition to this, you must acknowledge the necessity of approaching certain goals with a short-term strategy.

Identify strategies for achieving your goals

Review the goals you set for yourself, and then develop a list of the factors that, in your opinion, have contributed to the current state of affairs. Think about the different courses of action you may take to improve the situation and the options available to you.

Depending on the goals that you have set for your firm, you should carefully consider whether or not it would be beneficial to use the services of a professional in the field of business, such as a business consultant, a business contractor, or a professional trainer.

Think about the things that you can accomplish on your own and the areas in which you would be better off with some assistance. Compare and contrast these two lists.

Develop a plan for implementing your strategies

To achieve the goals that you have set for yourself, you will need to figure out how to put your methods into action. A strategy's execution typically involves several separate activities or tasks. It is in your best interest to plan out the particulars of how you intend to carry out these measures; doing so is in your best benefit.

Develop your plan using a easiest structure for you to understand and work with. The following items ought to be included in it:

• a time frame is an estimate of how much time, in addition to the starting and finishing dates of a project, will be needed to complete it.
• activities – Describe every single step in as much detail as possible.
• responsibilities: make sure that everyone knows exactly what is expected of them and who is accountable for ensuring that the work is finished by assigning responsibility for each activity.
• resources: a list that should be made detailing the finances, personnel, and materials needed to complete each action.
• a desired outcome: specify the criteria that will be used to evaluate whether or not the activity was carried out effectively.

After you have completed designing your plan, you ought to consider modifying your whole approach to conducting company as well.

Measure the results

Checking to see if you've finished an activity might be a straightforward way to choose how you will evaluate the success of your efforts to reach the results you have set for yourself.

When you have more ambitious objectives, you may need to devise a method of evaluation that is more intricate, such as boosting profits by a predetermined percentage or acquiring a specific number of new customers.

When working towards these kinds of objectives, assigning points as a means of monitoring your progress and gauging your level of achievement can be another useful strategy. This will assist you in sticking to your plan and achieving your goals.

Consider how frequently you wish to evaluate your firm's success. This might also assist you in regularly setting new goals for yourself.

Four leadership tips to help you sustain business growth

How can you keep your firm expanding when most new businesses, even the most promising ones, tend to plateau after only a few years in operation? According to an article written by Sabri Suby, founder of King Kong, Australia's fastest-growing digital agency, good leadership entails investing in your team and yourself to assist the business succeed.

Invest in your people

It has never been the case that a single person was able to accomplish much on their own, and the sooner you realise this fact and invest in good people, the better off you will be.

There has never been an instance of a single person accomplishing anything on their own.

When I originally started working on King Kong, I did all of my work from the comfort of my own home using only a laptop computer and a phone.

As soon as I realised that I couldn't continue to expand it by myself past a certain point, I shifted my focus to putting together my personnel and the infrastructure of the firm.

I did this as soon as I realised that I couldn't continue to expand it by myself past a certain point. When you put yourself in situations where positive individuals surround you, they make it easier for you to take opportunities when they present themselves.

I base my hiring decisions on applicants' attitudes. The skills indicated on a CV only go so far, and businesses are missing out on a great deal of talent because they base their recruiting decisions on skills that can only be obtained through additional training or experience.

It is preferable to find someone with a can-do attitude who is not afraid of hard labour and train them up rather than seeking someone else to perform the work since it is easier to train someone than find someone else to do the work.

Investing money in your team should involve more than just putting that money towards the team's training.

If your employees spend more than 40 hours a week working for you and with each other, then you owe it to them to make the experience enjoyable for them.

When you welcome exceptional people onto your team, it is important to ensure they are well taken care of and have something to look forward to each day when they come to work.

The adage that "your customers come first" is adhered to by a sizeable number of businesses is widespread. When you have moved past the stage of starting a firm, the phrase "put your people first" should be the motto that guides your activities.

This is the component that you can manage well at scale, and it is the component that you should prioritise. Your crew is the single most important thing to get right, as they are the ones who will be interacting directly with customers and clients.

Value yourself

When starting a new business, one of the most important things to do is become acclimated to doing everything by themselves. If you want your company to be successful and if you want to grow as a leader, you have to get out of this mentality if you want any of those things to happen.

Get used to the difficulty of identifying your own strengths and limits, as well as the gaps in your skill set, since once you are aware of your deficiencies, you can work to eliminate them. Acquaint yourself with the discomfort of identifying your own strengths and limitations.

The key to King Kong's long-term success has been the company's willingness to delegate its day-to-day operations to a management team of world-class calibre, which has allowed the company to focus on expanding its market share.

Figure out how to defend the investment of your time in this procedure by reading up on the topic. You should set up a certain amount of time each day for your team to meet with you.

This will allow them to get in touch with you when they need to, but it will also ensure that they are unable to distract you while you are in the zone.

Instead of figuratively leaving the door open, you should instruct your team to request a conversation using one of the available channels, such as an executive assistant or a scheduling app, if you have access to any of these tools.

Strive for productivity

The Pareto principle, commonly known as the '80/20 rule,' which asserts that 20% of activities are responsible for 80% of revenue, is certainly something you're already familiar with. According to this principle, you may attribute 80% of your revenue to 20% of your activities.

As a result of my research into King Kong, I came to the realisation that only 4% of my efforts might be responsible for producing 64% of our overall earnings. This discovery was reached after conducting an investigation.

That is the focus of my attention, and the other aspects are taken care of by the skilled members of my team.

I consider planning an investment I make in myself on a personal level since I am aware that the time I devote to planning now will pay off in the form of time savings in the long term. In order to come up with a plan that will lead to the successful completion of your overarching objective, you should first partition it into monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

Having a plan for each day can provide you with the momentum you need to be productive throughout the day.

Take risks

In the world of business, if you put off making a decision until you have all of the information at your disposal, you will never choose a course of action.

Great leaders are competent risk-takers who are able to quickly analyse the potential benefits and drawbacks of 30–40 percent of their decisions so that they may take calculated risks.

This allows them to take advantage of opportunities that may not always be available. Being decisive enables one to make the most of possibilities, which, in turn, makes it possible to maintain a competitive advantage over others.

If you haven't laid a strong foundation for your business, you can't reasonably anticipate that your expansion will be sustainable. If you want to go from being a single entrepreneur to being the leader of a much larger team, you need to hire the right people to support you by a culture and set of abilities that allows you to expand.

If you don't hire the right people, you won't be able to make the transition from being a single entrepreneur to being the leader of a much larger team

This gives you the breathing room you need to become a productive and effective leader, enabling you to embrace opportunities as they arise and move your organisation forwards. This gives you the breathing room you need to become a productive and effective leader.

How to drive business growth in 2021

If you’re a small business feeling the same, here are a few things I learnt along the way:

The movie "The Matrix" showed us a world beyond our wildest imaginings, and in the year 2020, COVID-19 showed us a reality beyond our wildest imaginings.

Melanie Power, a successful entrepreneur and respected leader in the business world, is featured in the video that follows.

In it, she discusses the advice that she offers to her global network of accounting professionals and business owners of small companies regarding the best way to navigate the current digitally-driven environment.

Who else, in addition to me, is worn out by constantly being reminded of "strange moments" and "pivots"? And yet, in many ways, it appears to be the most true picture of the things we go through daily.

The effects that COVID-19 has had, particularly on micro and small businesses, have been highly severe. The cumulative effect is much more significant when independent firms make up a major section of the economy in Australia and New Zealand, as they do in both countries.

This is because the independent enterprises in both nations contribute significantly to the economy.

Over the last several months, I have worked in extremely close collaboration with accounting experts from all over the world as well as from my local neighbourhood to traverse this uncomfortable reality and get a deeper comprehension of the numerous challenges they face.

In particular, a large number of people, the majority of whom own small businesses, are having problems overcoming the challenge of bringing their organisations online for the first time. These people run the bulk of the small businesses in the United States. For some, it's like entering a totally new world.

What struck me was the sheer scope of the changes that small businesses are currently having to contend with in the modern business environment. Many people have said that the feeling they got when going through COVID-19 was quite similar to the one they got when they saw The Matrix for the first time.

In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus explains to Neo that many people just aren't prepared to see the Matrix since it is a reality that is so drastically different from the one they are accustomed to and comfortable with. Those individuals who have not seen the movie will benefit from my explanation.

Because I went through the exact same procedure when I moved my business online for the first time many years ago, I am qualified to provide expert commentary on the topic.

Because of my relentless drive, ability to learn from my failures, and pure good fortune, I expanded my company to the point where it serves 120 customers without ever having to resort to paid advertising.

As a direct consequence of this, I am now in a position to demand the value that is justly mine, to begin with. My firm, which provides training and coaching to accountants and bookkeeping experts so that they may control the price they deserve to charge their customers, has developed to the point where it is now worth several millions of dollars.

If you run a small business and find yourself in a similar position, the following are some valuable lessons I've picked up along the way:

Be clear about what you stand for

Taking your business online may be an effective method of bringing in new customers and maintaining touch with the customers you already have. It is also an option that can save you money.

Customers want to know how they would benefit from working with your company, and they may become perplexed if they are provided a variety of services that are above their capabilities to comprehend.

I come across many websites offering a wide variety of services, but they litter the page with industry jargon that a small business owner probably won't comprehend.

Pay attention to what it is that you can contribute, and then incorporate your point of view into it. It is essential to have a firm grasp of one's identity as well as the values and ideals that guide one's life.

Identify who you want to work with

When you have established who you are and what you believe in, it will be much simpler for you to define the characteristics of the individuals with whom you would like to work together. Working with customers who do not respect them or who place little worth on what they have to offer is a frustrating experience for everyone.

Working with customers who do not respect them or who do not value what they have to offer is frustrating. It will be much simpler for you to pull in new clients via the internet if you have a distinct picture in your head of the type of client you consider to be ideal for your business.

This is due to the fact that you will be able to construct and describe your product in your marketing with increased precision.

You run the risk of being overly general, wasting valuable time on customers who aren't a good fit for your company, and spreading yourself too thin if you attempt to cater to everyone's needs at the same time.

In addition, you run the risk of being overly general if you attempt to cater to everyone's needs at the same time.

Take a systematic marketing approach

In order to generate new client leads, you need to have a structure and method in place, just as you would if you were giving service to an existing customer.

In other words, you can't just wing it. Make an effort to avoid being haphazard and believing that a single presence at a networking event or a single post on LinkedIn would result in new business. Both of these assumptions are likely to be incorrect. Given the current circumstances, it is quite unlikely that this will occur.

It takes time to market to prospective clients, and if you have a strategy in place, you can take suggestions #1 and #2 and use them to develop intelligent and considered material, which will bring you more clients that you want to work with.

If you do not have a strategy in place, you will not be able to take these suggestions and use them to develop intelligent and considered material.

To summarise, the following are some methods that you may make the process of showing your value to existing clients and future clients more straightforward and move it along more quickly:

• Figuring out who you want to talk to and how to approach them in order to do so
• What to say
• Why you are saying it

In the meantime, it is extremely necessary to refrain from forgetting the fundamentals of operating a business, as this is what will ensure the continuous success of your firm as it expands.

Failing to do so will result in your business failing to achieve its goals. Cash flow is still the most crucial component of any business, and tools like cloud solutions may give you visibility to assist you in keeping track of both your spending and your income so that you can make informed decisions about your company's financial situation.

Even if you already have a website, that won't be enough to ensure a smooth move into the online world.

By applying this logic to the way that you market and interact online – while retaining focus on your core financials in the background – you will save time and money and increase the likelihood that your company will thrive despite the current economic climate. Start with the basics; everything else will fall into place from there. Start with the fundamentals.