If you want to grow as a business, you have to make choices. But making choices is scary! How do you preserve the quality of your service or product while growing?
An entrepreneur creates his own path
I would like to start this blog with a personal story. When I was studying Computer Science, I decided to start a restaurant. Even before opening the doors to this restaurant, I was being bombarded with an endless number of choices. What should be on the menu? What kind of food was trending at the time? Should I deliver or not? What kind of staff would I need? Making this many decisions was something I was not at all used to. That’s what sets entrepreneurs apart from traditional workers. For the latter it’s often much clearer what has to be done to become successful. Even for students, being successful is simply a matter of getting good grades by learning Chapters 4 to 6 for the upcoming exam. But as entrepreneurs, you have to create your own path. No matter what type of business you plan on starting,you will be making choices and these choices determine the success of the business and how it will grow. In retrospect, I clearly made the wrong choices with my restaurant or I wouldn’t be where I am today. But I did learn something, you need to make your choices based on all of the information available.
Growing while maintaining quality
The moment your company starts to grow, your responsibilities increase as well. You’ll begin to get more customers, hire more employees, do more marketing campaigns, and etc. Not just that, there’s even more pressure on you to make the right choices. So there is a lot more work to be done within the company, and although you may try to keep control of everything in the beginning, you can’t go on micromanaging forever. After all, you still want to grow. And at a certain point it becomes impossible to keep breathing down every employee’s neck, checking everything. If you continue doing that, you’re creating a bottleneck for yourself. If you decide to grow, you must be certain that you are able to let go of certain processes, while at the same time ensuring that you maintain the pace. When it comes to important processes, many people think of acquisition, but actually one of the most important processes is focused on quality. How do you ensure that you continue to deliver quality without keeping all the strings tightly in your own hands? That is an important question that we can help with.
Important information in a row
The trick is to turn your processes into systems. Systems that can help you exert broader control with the increasing size of your company. Think of what KPIs are important to you and the company: What is most important for my business to measure? Where does my success lie? By automating processes, you ensure that those important measures become more visible to you. With that, those endless choices don’t seem all that hard to make anymore. Because all the necessary information is now accessible and simple to understand.