If you’re currently on an exciting upward swing with your startup, here are six important things you should consider as you continue to grow your startup.
1. Brand Maintenance
As a startup, your brand is your most important asset. Although it will be important to remain flexible and open to change as you grow, it will also be important to remain loyal to your brand and its core values. As you grow, listen to your customers for guidance. What are they asking for? How can you deliver on their wants and needs without compromising your brand’s values like delivering a quality product or providing personal customer care? Business2Community offers up a guide with some solid tips for remaining true to your brand through growth.
2. Product Development
Arguably one of the largest challenges you’ll face as you grow your startup is balancing product development efforts. Things like knowing when to stop modifying the product and maintaining quality production while delivering on increased demand can become an issue. Entrepreneur has an excellent guide to the three most common product development issues startups face with tips on how to overcome them.
3. Ongoing Financing
Another important issue that arises in most startups as they grow is managing financing. As you work toward becoming a more robust business with some financial backing, it can be difficult to understand exactly where you stand in terms of the funding you need for the future. ForEntrepreneurs provides a great step-by-step process to help startup owners better understand how their companies are valued and what this means in terms of necessary funding.
4. Bandwidth
Bandwidth issues include a wide variety of concerns from growing employee workload to decreasing server space. One way to combat workload rather than hiring new staff is to become more productive, and one way to do that is to utilize productivity apps. Check out this article for some recommendations. As for your server space, if your servers can’t handle the traffic due to growth, and upgrading isn’t on the cards with your current supplier, you could consider transferring everything over to another provider that can handle the volumes. You’ll also want to make sure you transfer your domain across to your new provider, you can find more information about the transferring process here.
5. Networking
Once you’ve started to grow your startup, it can be easy to lose some of the hustle you started out with. Although it’s important to take the time to focus on your current relationships and nurture those connections, it is equally important to continue to build solid relationships with additional connections in your industry as well. As you grow, continue to network. Stay active in your industry community. Keep up on industry events and make sure your company is well-represented at each major event that matters to your company’s role in the community. Entrepreneur has an excellent guide to help startup owners navigate the world of professional networking.
6. Salary Spend
As you grow, salary will become an important issue among your top performers. An important thing to remember is that it’s worthwhile to spend on the salaries of your employees who are making a positive impact on your business. If you’re unsure of where to start in scaling your employees’ salaries as you grow your startup, you can try to break it down to something of a science: Check out some tips on creating a formula for an employee salary. This could really be an infinite list if you factored in all of the unique challenges every startup faces in their respective industries. Although it would be impossible to cover everything, these basics should provide a pretty good idea of what key details you should be paying close attention to with your company’s growth. Hopefully, they will help you more effectively plan for future growth. If you have a tip or concern you’d like to share with fellow entrepreneurs, please let us know in the comments below!
