Running a company of any size isn’t easy, and there are certainly some unique challenges that come with trying to increase the scale of your business. Thankfully, there are a number of tactics and strategies that your company can employ in order to make the process more efficient and successful. By approaching your company’s growth with a clear structure, you’ll surely be able to prioritize and plan for the challenges that typically accompany an increase in scale.
The Correct Corporate Structure
Determining and implementing the correct corporate structure for your business is surely important to running an efficient company. Having a clear hierarchy and the right amount of autonomy at every level of the corporate structure will help guarantee that each part of the business runs as smoothly as possible. Some corporate structures will be more applicable to particular businesses than others–your industry, company size and management style will all influence the structure that functions best for your business.
Once you apply the correct structure, you’ll find that having clearly articulated roles and responsibilities allows your company to scale with minimal pushback and conflict among your employees.
Increasing Productivity Through Collaboration
It’s also important for your company to have clear standards and practices for employees, in order to ensure that your staff are making the most of their time and effort. A clear-cut system of decision-making and collaboration can help employees maximize their time, thereby allowing your company to run more efficiently.
In addition to setting clear expectations and decision-making processes among your employees, approaching your data in a similar manner will surely help to streamline communication. Nothing slows down the decision-making process more than when employees aren’t on the same page–especially when it comes to important data and company-wide information.
Thankfully, there are software systems to help manage this data. SplashBI, a business intelligence platform, says that high-tech software solutions can be helpful to keep data organized in order to streamline the decision-making process.
Similarly, this technology can be used to organize employee- and customer-facing information. When systems are smart, unified, and streamlined, companies can keep records, analyze data, and identify potential problems within the business. This is especially significant when attempting to increase the size of your business–if your data and processes aren’t currently organized, an expansion will only worsen this disorganization.
Take Advantage of the Benefits
While it may seem daunting to consider the difficulties of scaling your business, be sure to keep in mind the possible advantages of expanding. One such example is the concept of economies of scale, which is the cost advantage applied to your business as it grows.
The economy of scale is related to the decrease in the price of goods as you purchase in bulk–a concept we all understand at the individual-level, but which provides huge economic benefits the larger your company grows.
The idea of running a huge company may seem daunting, and there’s no doubt that it can be very challenging. However, it’s not impossible, and that’s largely thanks to the way corporate structures and computer systems can act as brains within businesses, countering potential problems while leveraging advantages.
Cover image: Fuelrefuel (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
