Scaling a business from a mom and pop shop to a Fortune 500 company requires dedication, grit, and the right tools to propel you forward. There is a multitude of best practices, tools, and resources available for small business owners. Sometimes the key to success is as simple as not giving up when things feel like they are falling apart.
Strategic Outsourcing
Outsourcing often gets a bad reputation because people envision factories overseas that take jobs away from the local workforce and take advantage of the already impoverished. However, outsourcing is highly complex and involves a wide range of services. Outsourcing includes all tasks and activities that you hire out of your company to get accomplished. For example, when you hire an SEO consultant, you are outsourcing your SEO services. When you contract with an outside company to provide IT services, web content, or data entry, you outsource.
To decide what services you should outsource and what services you should conduct internally, you need to weigh the real costs of the service, including the investment of your time. For example, many small business owners will choose to do their web design and digital marketing to save money because those are activities that can be learned online. To compare the real costs, you need to look at the amount of time it will take you to learn what to do and do it to the cost of hiring a professional. If you can hire a professional for three hours to get something done that would take you eight hours to do; the value is in hiring a professional. Additionally, the professional will provide better quality results because they are not trying to learn as they go.
Call Center Software
When you are growing quickly, customer service is critical to thriving. If the customer service lessens, growth will fault and you will repeatedly lose business. Microsoft call center software will allow you to monitor and ensure that you are consistently providing the best possible customer service. The software will streamline your processes and will enable you to grow painlessly. You can make changes as you grow and use the data made available through the software to make changes to your processes as you identify the need. Call center software is vital for any business that communicates directly with its customers. The right software will enable you to keep your customer service center internal in order to maintain the highest quality service and avoid problems going undetected.
Interview Scheduling Tool
When you grow quickly, the need to maintain capacity will be critical. The last thing you want to do is get in a situation where you have more orders than you can fulfill due to staffing constraints. As companies grow, they need to have a HR department that is consistently prepared to onboard new employees. Being in that position requires you to have a pool of potential candidates and efficiently and seamlessly schedule interviews with multiple people. An interview scheduling tool will also simplify ensuring numerous HR representatives and managers can be present for the interview. With this tool, you will be able to eliminate the back and forth phone calls and emails attempting to schedule an interview.
Fall Forward
All businesses will experience failures and make mistakes as they grow. The key to success is always to fall forward. Falling forward means always learning from the past, building on your mistake, and never giving up. Regardless of the mistake or failure experienced, some lessons can help propel the business forward. Every six months, schedule a lessons-learned meeting that will allow you to evaluate your process, look for needed areas of improvement, and set goals for the next six months.