As a leader and entrepreneur, growing pains are one of the most challenging things you’ll encounter. With success comes rapid growth, which demands accommodations you may not be prepared for. You may not have enough employees to handle the new workload, resources to manage it all, space to operate, or systems to work efficiently.
Growth pains can lead to frustration, miscommunication, and low morale when you should be able to celebrate the fruits of your labor.
So how do you guide your business through a growth spurt? Here are my top tips for curbing the pains and frustrations of growth.
6 Ways to Ease Company Growth Pains
#1 – Plan to scale up from the beginning.
Maybe you started your business venture as a solopreneur. By yourself, you can get away with a lot more than with a team. You don’t have to rely so much on delegation or communication when you’re the only one in the office. But every business should plan for and anticipate growth.
This anticipation includes a few things: flexing your leadership and communication skills, stress testing your current systems, and formalizing your modus operandi. These systems should consist of ways to track project progress, log and record pertinent documents, and communicate with clients and one another.
This is true whether or not you have a team.
#2 – Emphasize communication and clarity.
When growth forces change within a business, your highest priority should be clear communication. Any upheaval causes confusion. Not only do you want everyone on the same page, but you need them to be confident in any new responsibilities, systems, or company changes. Don’t leave room for hesitation, discouragement, or unclear objectives.
If anything, you should overcommunicate and overemphasize what’s going on.
#3 – Seek specific candidates to fill new roles.
With growing pains often comes the need to hire new people. You may need more people to share an existing workload or new positions for new tasks. Regardless, the hiring process can be long, frustrating, and costly. This is particularly true if you don’t have an HR department to handle it!
The best way to do this is to provide precise job descriptions. Who exactly are you looking for? Detail what the job entails, a reasonable salary range, expected proficiencies or education, and company culture. You want to weed out as many unqualified applicants as possible. You do this by ensuring only relevant, qualified individuals seek the position.
#4 – Establish employee onboarding.
Once you have a new hire, who trains them? Who sets up their company email and access to your systems? Don’t waste time with unnecessary roadblocks to productivity. You need a point person to show new people the ropes and equip them with everything they need to do the job.
This is just another reason why solopreneurs need to formalize how they operate. It allows you to better teach someone how things are done. Excellent training enables new hires to hit the ground running without any red tape in their way.
#5 – Hold intentional, effective meetings.
Studies show that productive meetings involve up to six individuals. Any more becomes a “too many cooks” situation. This makes meetings longer, and establishing actionable next steps becomes a more significant challenge.
If you hold a meeting, go in knowing what you want to accomplish. Checking in is fine, but fruitless discussions waste time and money. As much as you can, limit your company meetings to those directly related to the issue at hand.
Don’t be the boss that holds meetings that could have been an email. You take your time away from valuable productivity if you lack tangible goals and vision for your get-togethers.
#6 – Explore and embrace new systems.
Change is hard. There’s no denying it. Many times, though, our growing pains demand change. It may be as simple as upgrading a digital service to accommodate more people. From there, you must evaluate whether or not the added cost balances out against increasing revenue. Growing pains always create tighter margins before profits consistently increase.
Prepare yourself for that!
Explore other platforms and options. Test them out yourself. As a leader, it’s your job to provide consistency and clarity to your team. Introduce only new tools that you will stick with. New systems are often necessary, but avoid a culture that hops on the latest thing without a compelling reason.
On the one hand, you want to be aware of all available avenues. On the other, you don’t want to overwhelm your team with a million different tools and platforms. Introduce change slowly and intentionally.
What has been your biggest “growing pain” in your career? Share how you overcame in the comments.