Tag Archive for: business growth

Can you afford to grow? Can you afford not to?

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Growth: Can you afford it?

“Grow or die!” is a common, well-accepted business principal. Businesses must innovate, stay relevant, seek new customers, add locations, and offer new products.

But growth brings its own challenges. You have more products/services to support. You need more people. Rapid hiring makes maintaining culture harder. New tools and technology – and the time to integrate and use them – are expensive.

Your bottom line may suffer from your growth!

You may need to take steps to grow your bottom line instead of your top line. Eliminate products/services that aren’t profitable. Eliminate processes or activities that don’t add value. Don’t do things just because you’ve always done them. And, as hard as it may be, let go of employees who no longer fit culturally and don’t contribute to you vision.

Your bottom line profitability ultimately decides if you can afford top line growth and how long you can sustain it.

Read more about the good and bad of business growth here:  https://opalpg.com/2018/08/21/growth-good-bad-ugly/

 

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Return on…Resources?

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We all know what Return on Investments, or Equity, or Assets are but they may not tell the full story.  You need to get all you can from all your resources.  What is your Return on Resources?

Return on Resources???

You started and built your business on an idea, and then added sweat equity and capital to bring it to fruition.  Along the way you added people, provided training, invested in tools and software, began marketing, and possibly many other items.  Collectively, those are your company’s resources.  Why do you have them?  Because you need them to maximize your profits and the value of the business.

That’s where your operations come in.  Operations includes ALL the processes to keep your business running.  It’s not limited to how you deliver your products and services.

The goal of your operations is to extract value from every resource in your organization.

Let that sink in.  You only add people, equipment, processes, or services for one reason: to make more money.  Every employee, every tool, every asset, every decision should be contributing to reaching your goals in some way.  If not, it’s dead weight on your organization or consuming time and money that could be better used elsewhere.

Ask yourself if the value you are receiving from your resources is what you expected.

  • Do you add more people rather than look for ways to be more efficient?
  • Do new hires get up to speed and become productive quickly?
  • Are there products, services, or processes that add little value and should be modified or eliminated?
  • Have tasks, routines, products, or even employees been added slowly over time without a good top-down review to see if they are still needed?

If you aren’t making the most of your resources, let OPG help you maximize your return.

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Your business is growing….why don’t you feel like you are winning?

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Your business is growing. You’ve got a great product or service, you know your customers, and you’ve assembled a stellar team. But something has changed. Profitability has slipped, tasks take longer to complete than they should, or your team is frustrated. What’s going on?

You are a victim of your own success. Every business owner goes through it. It is part of the maturation process for any business.

What are some of the reasons you’ve gotten here?

You need to quantify your sales pipeline. Are you investing time in customers or entire market segments that aren’t profitable? Are the wrong types of opportunities taking away resources from more valuable opportunities?

Your systems haven’t kept up with your growth. Systems can be tools, processes, and software. As your business grows – in volume, the number and type of offerings, or complexity – you need to re-evaluate how your team executes the critical business tasks required to meet your customers’ needs and make changes as necessary.

Your team is confused or out of alignment. You’ve added people and maybe even entire departments. Valuable, productive employees who once had their hands in all aspects of the business aren’t sure who does what any more. Efforts are duplicated or worse, missed completely. Everyone is working toward different goals. The company culture you’ve built begins to change.

The bottom line is you are fighting fires. The cost of fighting fires manifests itself when you don’t have time to cast your vision for the company or nurture the company culture. You and your team are busy, but your aren’t effective or productive.

Growing companies will go through challenging periods or even seem to stall. It’s a natural part of the process. The key is to make sure you evaluate the root cause and understand the reason(s) why and take decisive corrective action.

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