Many things worked well when your small business no longer worked now that you are running a large company. Although you may still be in the same primary business, you now have to run it differently. Scaling up adds new pressure on your business, and you must deal with a new set of conditions.
It might not necessarily be that you’ve gotten inefficient. You are producing more goods faster 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 achieve in your small business.
It’s tough handling a large business, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed, but if you follow the basics correctly and patiently persevere, it’s not as hard as it seems. The below tips will help you alleviate your problems and handle your business effectively.
1. Manage your payrolls.
Doing payroll the same old trusted way may increase 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 various departments with diverse requirements, as well as provide service to employees with different payment needs.
2. Manage your meetings.
When your business was small, you had fewer business meetings. You probably also had to travel 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 raises your costs and limits the time you have to work on your business projects.
One solution is to opt for video conferencing instead of traveling regionally or internationally. Setting up a meeting is as simple as sending recipients a hyperlink and conducting the meeting via voice, video, and desktop sharing. Your sessions will go just as well, perhaps even better, and this alternative is simple and inexpensive.
3. Manage your telecommunications.
It can become pretty 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?
A softphone is a hybrid word for a 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.
4. Manage your technological infrastructures.
If your business is overgrowing, but you are still using an on-premise computer system, 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 can 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 the cloud service provider handles all that.
You can also scale up your business quickly by asking for more system resources and additional services. And your employees can access their work from anywhere at any time. This feature is handy if you outsource work and want to give independent contractors limited access to your database and enhance collaboration.
Remember, it’s not the same old business anymore!
The size makes a huge difference in business operations because you now deal with 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 more significant 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 many more customers, you may have several target audiences because you’ve entered several niches in the same industry.
The bigger your business gets, the more different it becomes. It may be so diverse that it’s just a question of semantics to say that you have the same company. In reality, you have a different business — a more significant, complex business that does more things with more resources to produce more robust results. By using the right solutions, you can prevent complexity from tipping into chaos.
