Widely known consulting companies like Netsuite consultant would tell you that beginning a start-up business is a scary prospect.
You don’t know the mechanics of the business. And you certainly have no idea how the wider public will react to the idea that you deemed great. However, once you start the business, you learn a few things as you get along.
What is more important is how to grow your business quickly once you have started it. There are many examples when great start-ups barely survived for a year and then packed their bags.
There are many questions that arise once you have opened the doors for customers. What marketing strategy you should follow? How to obtain customer feedback? Is your product/service up to the mark?
These and many other questions need an answer that will ultimately decide the fate of your business.
In the article below, we will discuss a few tips that will prove very helpful for the quick growth of your startup.
- Start With a Clear and Concise Vision
If you want your start-up to grow rapidly, it’s very important that you begin with a clear vision that focuses on the long-term success of your business.
How do you see your company in the next five years?
However, you should also have a mission statement that defines how you are going to achieve the goal you have set for yourself for the next five years.
Your long term goal, as well as your immediate mission statement, is both vital to the survival and the ultimate success of your business venture.
When you are working on these two aspects of your business, you will have a clear understanding of the long-term plan that you must follow for growth.
In fact, vision and mission combine together to constitute the purpose of your entity. If there is no clear purpose, the business will eventually fail.
Before you even begin your start-up, decide on its vision and mission because they are crucial recipes for success. They will provide you with a blueprint that will enable you to set a course and follow it to the letter.
- Set the Standards for Your Business
You must set the standard for your business from the very first day of its operations – even before that.
You must decide from the beginning how people perceive you and your business from the very start because it is very difficult to start with low standards and then raise it slowly and gradually.
This never happens. People make a perception of your business, and the standard of the goods and services it is offering. Once that perception is formed, you can neither break it nor amend it.
Which makes it important that from the very begging, you have a clear idea of the level of excellence you will be establishing and maintaining for your business. It is imperative for the start-up’s future growth.
Excellence should not be confined to the products/services only. You should be equally good after-sales customer service. Every client should be given the VIP treatment.
- Never Doubt Yourself
It will be game over once you start doubting yourself.
Great athletes would tell you that the best way of motivating players in the field is to raise expectations.
Business is like a game. Once you are in the field, you must start expecting great things from yourself. You must expect success.
Never doubt that you will win. Doubt creates fear, and fear makes you nervous. When you are nervous, you are unable to give your best performance. It’s a vicious cycle that starts with doubt and ends in failure and misery.
Believe that you are already successful. Act like you are running a successful business operation.
Being an entrepreneur is not an easy prospect. However, if you are passionate enough, and have a firm commitment towards your business, there is nothing that will stop you from succeeding.
- Establish well-Defined Procedures
Developing standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) is not something that people look forward to, but the importance of well-defined procedures for a start-up cannot be emphasized enough.
When you have clearly defined SOPs, your business operations become very smooth and easy.
They help you bring in new people and get more clients.
These procedures will bring consistency to your operations, and allow you and your employees to work in a cohesive manner.
The tasks assigned to each person will be compressive and easily understandable. It will stop duplication of work, save time, and usher inefficiency.
Another important thing is proper documentation and filing. Each document related to the business like invoices, bills and orders must be properly stored so that they can be retrieved at any time.
Customer files must be properly maintained.
All these things do not pertain to core business operations, but they are very important for the future growth of a start-up.
- Build a Great Team
Even if you are one of the most efficient people in the entire world, you can still not run the business alone.
You will need helping hands, people who will share your vision, and work with you for the success of your business. These people constitute your team.
And it is imperative that you start building it right after you begin operations.
The key is to hire people on the basis of who they are rather than gauging their skills. Of course, skills are very important, but these can be taught. However, no one can be taught integrity, honesty, and zeal.
This means that building a strong team does not necessarily mean hiring highly trained and skilled people. Rather, it means taking on board people who will share your vision, and work for the future growth of your business.
Investing in such a team will pay your long-term dividends and bring your business closer to success.
The Final Word.
Start-ups have become successful, and they have failed.
There is no set formula that defines what you can do to become successful. Sometimes, it is an idea that clicks, and sometimes it a person that becomes successful.
However, it does not mean that every start-up should simply lay the foundations for his / her business and then leave everything to fate.
There are some things that are imperative for the future growth of a start-up. A few of them have been discussed in the above article. But the list is not exhaustive.
If you are in a business, you know how it works, what do your customers demand, and how well you and your team are able to deliver the required product/service.
Each one of these elements will define your start-up’s future growth and success, so you should start dealing with them right away.
