The Growing Pains of Small Businesses

As a business owner, running a small business has its fair share of difficulties. There are so many things that can happen that can hinder your growth along the way to success. We aren't just talking about disastrous events either. Here are some examples you may encounter on the path to greatness.

Facility expansion
A business has to come from something, and most of the time it's with a really great idea. It usually starts out with a couple of people working diligently in a small location to promote this great idea. As the idea materializes and grows into its natural form of a quality service or product, the demand increases. Suddenly, the workload inflates and you're left with only one option, hire more staff. As this progresses, the seams of your walls begin to bulge with new team members. Before you know it, your conference room is no longer a conference room, and all of your interior walls are lined with workstations.

The fact of the matter is, unless you plan on selling your idea and living off of the royalties, you'll eventually need room to expand. Keeping a little room in the budget, and scouting for a potential contractor or new real estate may not be a bad idea.

Onboarding
While your business grows and you hire new staff, it's important that a structured roadmap to a new hire's success is in place. When you hire new staff you're essentially investing in them. With any proper investment, you want to make sure that it gains value. This is why you need to ensure that a strong onboarding process is incorporated into your business model. Different people have different values, beliefs and do things differently from one another. Laying out the business' policy's, standard operating procedures, and expectations is necessary to neutralize some of these differences. Then you leverage their strengths, while coaching them on their opportunities for improvement. Employees are the number one asset to your business, and if the onboarding process is done properly, it gives them a strong base to build on that eventually allows them to provide value in your business.

IT Breakdowns
In order to survive in today's competitive business world, it's inevitable that you're going to have some form of IT infrastructure. Technology, if implemented and managed properly, increases efficiency and productivity while presenting new opportunities for your business to grow. If not managed properly, you can lose the profitability that IT would provide through downtime and unexpected hardware expenses. In order to manage it properly you're left with three options; hire in house technicians, outsource your IT, or a combination of the two. While promoting in-house staff may seem at first an effective solution, there a couple of reasons why it may not be as effective as first perceived.

In-house technicians often get bogged down with PEBKAC's (Problem Exist Between Keyboard And Chair) from other employees that aren't so tech savvy. They can get sick, making your IT vulnerable to increased downtime, and there is the element of surprise when they tell you they need to purchase a $300 hard drive to replace the one that just failed (and oh by the way, 25% of its data in unrecoverable). You outsource your IT to a business like Computerware, you eliminate these possibilities. We are always available to work on your IT (we don't call in), and has a multitude of low cost, flat-rate service plans like Data Backup and Recovery to protect your data, Network Maintenance and Monitoring to prevent company downtime and hardware expenses, plus much more. We can make your IT worry free and reduce cost associated with IT issues. Give us a call at (703) 821-8200 and gain complete control of your IT budget today.