I Don’t Have A Clear Path Of How To Grow The Business Without Burying Me

Do you want to grow your business, but you feel like you’re already buried six feet under?

Have you turned customers away, even though you could have used the revenue, because you are just swamped?

Let’s explore why you feel that way and how you can choose growth without burying you.

Before we begin, you have to understand that not all growth is created equal. Many sales books and consultants will often encourage you to grow for the sake of growth, but that’s just growing for income. Follow an income growth strategy and you will be buried sooner or later.

However, if you scale with a focus on growing the equity value of your business, you will be building a sustainable growth path that actually frees your time as you scale, instead of the other way around.

Let’s look at some common growth challenges and how you can overcome them with an equity growth focus.

Capital

Having too little money, the capital, to grow your business is a major impediment to growth.

There are three ways to get the funding you need to grow the business. You can:

1. Generate cash from your operations and reinvest that in the business.
2. Borrow money and invest, or
3. Dilute your ownership by selling equity in your business and invest the proceeds in the business.

In terms of desirability, reinvesting cash from operations is the best option for owners, followed by debt, and finally diluting their ownership by bringing in outside investors.

Generating cash from operations fits in with the strategy of optimizing your project scoping, staffing, and pricing. When you allocate your resources efficiently, and you price them effectively, then you can generate more capital. How? Because you are generating higher fees for better projects and completing them more efficiently. This allows you to invest more resources, which means you can scale the business even more.

There are a few steps to take to increase the cash from operations you need to scale:

• Optimize what you have. If you have a staff of five, how are they allocated, how are they spending their time? Maybe you can pick up two or three clients and increase your capital by utilizing your staff more efficiently and pricing accordingly.

• Price according to experience. Remember, if you as the business owner are directly involved, you need to charge more for your expertise. Once you’re utilizing your staffing better and pricing more effectively, you will generate much higher capital than before and better scale your business.

• Enhancing your staff. With more money to invest, you will also be able to provide better training and/or hire the additional staff you may need to best scale the business. Higher staff quality means higher utilization and better paying projects. This also frees more of your time as the business and your staff can handle more and more without your personal involvement. The growth wheel keeps spinning and your life gets better.

So as well as assessing staff resources in terms of numbers, assess staff quality and skills for your roadmap. If you have created a clear plan on the services that you can scale with your current resources and assets, you are starting to get a very good picture of how you  can grow your business without it all resting on your back.