Listed in: Starting up
Preparing your new business for growth
Your new business is likely to be scalable if you plan to grow before you start. Find out what and how you can help set your business up to scale.
3 minute read
As a new business that has just launched, you probably know how much capacity your business has, taking into account time in the day, number of employees, available equipment, and channels to market. If you’re looking to grow fast, it is useful to think about what you will need to do to keep up with the growth.
Here are some tips to help ready your business for growth.
Build capability
Capability is your ability to run the business, and building capability will help you build your business faster and bigger by having the right equipment, people or resources on hand to do the job, and the facilities to do it in.
Ways to build capability can include:
- adopting the latest technology to automate processes as much as you can
- implementing quality control systems to reduce errors or returns
- having access to additional resources at short notice
- using suppliers who have the capacity to keep pace with your growth
- ensuring your premises or location is suitable for expansion
- grow your team.
Think about what you’d need in place to grow your business and the capability you’d require to cope with that growth. Scope potential growth markets. Sketch out a roadmap of other channels to market your business to manage extra demand when you scale, so you’re ready to invest your energy and money when the time is right.
There are a number of different ways to sell more of what you do, for example:
- open more stores and locations
- move to larger premises
- purchase machinery that can increase production fast
- widen your product and service range
- sell online
- import to complement production
You could also look at future partnerships. Identify those businesses that are complementary to yours who are prepared to collaborate and share marketing, staff, customer, and production expertise and resources to speed up your growth.
Maintain the customer experience
When you’re small, it’s easy to have personal contact with every customer. But as you grow, and you gain more customers, the personal contact you can have with each individual reduces.
To maintain a high customer experience, you could:
- delegate customer contact early to key employees
- use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to maintain contacts
- use technology to predict customer buying behaviour and preferences
- develop automated customer loyalty programs.
Remember, your customers are the most vital component of your business so making them feel they’re been listened to and rewarded is essential, no matter how large your business grows.
Fund for business growth
You may need additional funding (capital) to scale your business for growth. Even if your business is enjoying a healthy cash flow, expansion is often expensive.
To help you understand your funding capacity, you could go through the capital raising steps you did when you started up (friends, family, loans, bootstrapping, external investors, crowdsourcing) and find out how much you may need to grow.
Scaling a business for growth can be much easier if you have thought about what you’d need to have in place to grow, when your business is still new. Small businesses with a plan in place, help increase their chance of success. You can too.
This material is for general information purposes only and does not constitute, and is not intended as, personalised financial advice or as a replacement for legal advice. BNZ strongly recommends you seek advice specific to your personal financial or legal situation from a qualified adviser. Neither BNZ nor any person involved in the material accepts any liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage arising out of the use of, or reliance on, all or any part of the content.