According to recent research, small and medium-sized business bosses have doubled the amount of time they spend trying to grow their company. The data revealed that the average company owner now spends almost a third of their working week on planning and delivering growth, whereas last year, bosses were concentrating far more on admin and non-essential tasks.
Clearly then, a lot of companies believe that now is the right time to start planning for growth. So what are the best steps to take now?
First, it’s worth taking a long, hard look at the current state of your business, and in particular reviewing the staff you have and the roles they are filling. Inevitably during a recession, most firms will have had to make redundancies, and that may mean that you now have some employees effectively doing more than one person’s job. While good employees can do this for a while, it’s worth thinking about how long you can reasonably ask them to sustain the workload, and how you could effectively split their role in the future.
For example, if your order books have now started to fill up, could you use some part-time administrative support to lighten the load on key employees and let them get on with what they do best? Starting to plan now for this will help if you need to do it in the future.
Second, now is a great time to work out whether your technology is allowing your staff to work in the most effective way possible. If you have an IT manager, ask them to look closely at whether there are any ways to either reduce costs (for example, by adopting cloud computing) or areas where smart investment could yield quick returns.
Finally, and most importantly, now is a great time to look again at what you do best, and ensure your business is focused on this. Recessions have a habit of making it very clear why your customers value you as a business – and if you can understand this, you’re well on your way to growth.
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