From the title, you might be puzzled as to how business growth can negatively affect you. For many stakeholders, business growth means success, which comes with new opportunities, customers, revenues, and so on. With the obvious benefits of business growth, it comes with its set of challenges and risks.
When you don’t grow strategically, you begin to have issues like overstretched resources, complicated processes, frustrated employees, and so on. If measures are not put in place to arrest the situation, you might begin to see reversed growth.
Research has shown that rapid business growth can pressurize business managers into wrong decisions. We’d be discussing this topic using instances, so let’s dive into it.
The Ways Business Growth Can Negatively Affect You
1. Euphoric Decision Making
In simple terms, this is when you make decisions on impulse or using emotions to navigate through the business growth.
For instance, you noticed there is a high demand for one of your products/services. You made euphoric decisions just to meet up with demand with less regard for how it was achieved.
Most time, the decisions made give you short-term gains. But the questions you need to ask yourself are, what are the short and long-term implications to the business? What protocols were broken to achieve the desired? And so on. Don’t run your business this way.
What to do
When demand increases, you need to meet with your team to analyze areas of your business that needs to be improved.
Questions like this will come up, do you have the number of personnel that corresponds with the business growth? Do you have the business management software to automate and simplify processes? Do you have the right infrastructure to accommodate the growth? Which policies do I need to implement? How can I be compliant? And so on.
Not planning strategically for short and long, is how business growth can negatively affect you.
.
2. Constant Intervention
Business growth comes with more activities and interactions, let’s focus on customers. Customers will have issues and complaints. If not handled properly, it can degenerate.
If you as a manager continually step in to diffuse situations. This means you need to automate the complaints process, empower your subordinates to handle situations. Your managerial time and energy are needed for better use elsewhere in the business.
Always be on the lookout for ways to automate processes so it doesn’t need constant intervention, especially when it becomes repetitive.
What to do
As part of the automation process, you can let your staffs experience the buying process customers face, this gives room for gap analysis and coming up with creative ways to improve the process.
In addition, empower your personnel to own the processes. This will instill a proactive mindset and innovation as the business grows.
.
3. Work-Life Balance
Without a doubt, it is your personnel that drives the business. If you like, have the best policies and product or service, you’ll be an island. Now, with the business growth, you’ll demand more from them. But what are you giving to demand more?
The workforce of now will be different from the workforce of the future. To put into perspective, people born within the years 1985 and 2001 prioritize personal experience and wellbeing before that of the business.
They like flexible and conducive working environments and are not cut out for hierarchies.
Now to the issue, your business is experiencing growth, and as part of long-term strategies, it is this age bracket that will most likely be in your workforce.
So this begets the question, what can you do?
What to do
You need to support flexible working, a good step in that direction is to use digital tools like phones, laptops to drive them.
Another thing to do is, periodically conduct surveys on how they feel about the business, the working conditions, and what can be done to improve the standards.
Improving the work-life, lowers stress, and reduces turnover.
Happy people are more productive.
.
4. Not Being Realistic
Business growth can negatively affect you if you are not realistic. React intelligently to the realities of your customers, economy, society, industry, and so on.
This is because your business growth can either make or mar you.
Reach out to your network, reputable consultants, experienced business managers, and communicate so that you can prepare for murky waters. You can even revisit some of your contracts and agreements to accommodate the new growth.
Also, incorporate training to accommodate the ongoing new normal. Conclusively, planning strategically for the future is non-negotiable. If you fail to plan, you’re already planning to fail.
Leave a Comment