You’ve finally gotten your business off the ground, you’re making regular sales, and finally turning a profit. You’re ready to invest in marketing, a robust website platform, a sales management platform, or a new accounting system when you realize something has gone terribly wrong. You know you and your employees have gathered hundreds of contacts, but you can’t find them, or a salesperson left, taking all their contact information with them. Your account records are missing information. Your invoices are saved on someone’s computer and you can’t make sense of their dozens of files and folders. You want to send clients an e-newsletter, but only 10% of your contacts have email addresses on file.
These scenarios happen to small businesses every day. The reality is, while we’re taught over time how to make a sale, how to build your professional network, and all the skills needed for our trade, when it comes to how to set up the back-end of a business — your databases, your processes, your record keeping — people are often left to learn through (painful) experience.
For many small businesses just starting out, technology and marketing needs are simple — people often get the bare minimum tools they need to close sales and try to reach fiscal stability. Businesses rely on using Outlook or Gmail to email and manage their contacts. Perhaps they rely on Excel or Microsoft word templates to create invoices. Perhaps they save their various files nested in deeper and deeper levels in their email or on their desktop. And these strategies work for many businesses just starting out; after all, when the first 18 months of your business can make or break your financial future, it’s important to take advantage of free or inexpensive tools to make things work while you grow your clientele and revenue.
But the choices you make can make the difference between a scalable, future-ready business, and a future of expensive technology updates or copious amounts of lost revenue due to bogged-down business processes. While quick and easy solutions might look good on the surface, behind the scenes you may be setting yourself up for complications when it’s finally time to expand your business with new technologies.
So how can you take steps to create a scalable business foundation, without breaking the bank? How can you make sure your business is ready for a future growth cycle?
Step 1. Contact Management
If your business involves communicating with clients, proper contact management is a vital first step that is often overlooked. Many small businesses rely on their Outlook or Gmail contact lists, but when it’s time to grow your business, you can run into issues, especially if your business has multiple employees managing contacts in their own email accounts. Whether you eventually decide to start a simple e-newsletter, or you take the leap to move to a complete CRM platform, your contacts will be a key component, so it’s important to take early steps to ensure your contacts are organized. Both Outlook and Gmail for business have options to create global or shared contact lists, which allows your business to keep your contacts organized in 1 place, rather than separate employees keeping contacts in their own email accounts. There are also CRM platforms with free starting packages, like HubSpot and Zoho. These platforms allow you to manage contact records, while also providing additional tools and features, and allows you to export your contacts in the future if you decide to move to other platforms or tools.
It takes extra effort to set up a strong contact management foundation, but it will allow you to scale your business in the future by reducing the chances of duplicate or lost contact records, and will allow you an easier way to maintain your contacts and keep your data clean and up to date.
Step 2. Start your data on the right foot
Speaking of clean data, nothing is worse than paying a bunch of money for a new business tool only to realize all the data you imported is a mess. Data is never going to be perfect, but being thoughtful about your data organization can make it easier to keep things updated and move data from system to system as you grow. To start, decide what data you want to capture on your clients, and try to always gather the information during your sales process. At a minimum, aim for the basics — name, email, address, business name, phone. You don’t need to capture this information in your first conversation, but try to gather these details throughout your sales process. Then consider if there are other data points you’d want to know. If you’re a B2B company, you may want to know the number of employees or estimated sales revenue. If you’re a retailer, you might want to know birthdays or what type of products the client is most interested in. Take time to think about the data that matters to you and build it into your sales process. By considering these data points early on in your business, you’ll ensure more of your records have these valuable insights.
Step 3. Organize your files
One thing that plagues big and small companies alike is file organization. Whether your employees save files on their computers or your team uses cloud services to save and share files, it’s incredibly easy for your documents to become a mess very quickly. Setting up a file organization structure early on can help prevent future headaches, and utilizing tools like Google Suite, Onedrive, Evernote, or Dropbox can help your team keep files in 1 place, and allows you to keep track of your organization system.
- Consider whether you want to organize by product, by year, by client name, by invoice number, or another strategy.
- Come up with a standard for naming files and folders and encourage employees to do the same, so files can be found quickly and easily.
- Create a few folders to keep standard business documents like your logo, any templates you use, sales decks, and other marketing items.
You don’t need to figure out the perfect filing system right away; your needs may change over time, and as you learn and adapt, you may decide a different organization structure would work better for you. If your files are organized, it will be easier to find what you need or re-organize in the future as you grow. It will also help reduce risk for your business in the event that you operate in an industry that is subject to audits or regulations.
Step 4. Develop your client journey
This may sound like cliche buzzwords, but the heart of the message is important. You must understand your client journey in order to grow. How does your client find your business? What steps does your client take to complete a purchase? How do they use your product? Is your business a repeat business, or more for 1 time purchases? It’s important to not only know the answers to these questions, but write them down. Writing down your client journey allows you to identify the business processes you need to be successful, which in turn helps determine things like what type of files you need, how you should organize your contacts, or what type of tools you might need to improve your processes.
Here’s an example of how outlining your client journey can help you prepare for growth:
How do clients find your business?
Social media, word of mouth, the internet. Great, you’ll need a website, social media accounts, and might consider creating a referral program. Not ready to build out a full website? You can add that to your future roadmap.
What steps does your client have to take to complete a purchase? How do they use your product?
They need to provide information, sign a contract, and make a payment. How will they take these steps? Perhaps you want an online form to gather information, then you’ll call them for a consultation, send an invoice, and have them pay via check. This can guide you to identify the types of document templates you might need or future technology you might like to have. Rather than paying by check, you might want to explore card payment options in the future, which might influence your decisions on how you set up your website, or which accounting systems you might use.
Is the business a repeat business?
If the answer is yes, how can you re-engage clients to bring them back for another purchase? You might want to consider email marketing, subscriptions, or discount programs in the future, which can again influence your decisions on your website or other technologies. If your business is not a repeat business, how can you ensure a regular flow of new clients? Perhaps your investments in this case should be focused on growing your reach through organic search or paid ads.
As your business grows and changes, you’ll find that you have more than one client journey, but by focusing on these key questions, you create a full picture that allows you to better plan for the future and identify your current and ongoing needs and opportunities.
Step 5. Be consistent
The best business processes will still fail if they aren’t followed consistently. You can spend thousands of dollars on software and services or build out complex automated processes, but if your entire team isn’t actively working to follow your processes, you will still run into the same pain points when it’s time to grow your business to the next level. You don’t need to micromanage — the point isn’t to tell employees how to do their jobs, but to create repeatable, scalable business practices that can be beneficial to your team and to your company’s future growth.
Small Businesses face many challenges, and business owners have much to learn as they go. But being a small business doesn’t mean you’ll always operate like a small business, and your potential to scale your company and grow with new technologies doesn’t need to be limited by the size of resources you have when just starting out. By taking steps to set up these business foundations early, you can position your business to be prepared to grow and scale to meet your future goals.