5 Ways to Manage Business Growth Without Losing Momentum

Business is good, and that’s great. Yet, you can’t help but feel as nervous as a kid in the doctor’s office. While the influx of customers is great, the change and new challenges for your business that come with them has you wringing your hands. Sure, you want to cultivate these new opportunities, but how can you do so without endangering your current client relationships?

Here’s my secret: To effectively manage growth, have the courage to embrace any worthy risk. There is no doubt that the success I experienced in my 30 years building two businesses came because my business partners and I embraced risk every day.

Think about this. Risk always travels with a very desirable companion: opportunity. Every opportunity includes risk. This is a business deluxe package, and it’s well worth the price.

Turn back the clock to the moment your business was launched. Do you realize the odds you faced when you took the leap of faith to start a new business? After all, 80 percent of all businesses fail after three years. Talk about risk! You had the courage to do it then, and in order to sustain growth, you’ll have to embrace risk once again.

Here are five ways to manage the growth of your business without losing momentum:

1. Always play to win. People hate to lose. In fact, studies have shown that there is twice as much joy in NOT LOSING than there is in winning. Humans have loss aversion because of the pain we feel when we lose.

In sports, when a team gets a big lead, they change their game plan to protect their lead. The very strategy that put them into the lead is thrown out so they won’t have to face the possibility of losing. The problem with a play not to lose strategy is the competition is not going along with your plan; they are doing everything possible to win.

When you switch to a defensive strategy in business, you cease the forward movement. But competition and the ever-changing demands of customers require all businesses to maintain forward progress. Always play to win. When you do, your mindset is positive and enthusiasm high.

2. Make the tough choices. Indecision is the mental paralysis in humans that prevents us from moving forward. Yet decision-making is a key component of execution, and execution is what transforms a plan into reality. When no decisions are made, nothing happens, and you don’t move forward; you stagnate and your business begins to decline.

Business owners never want to make bad decisions, so sometimes they don’t make any decision at all. The reality is what we really fear is a bad outcome, and the irrational leader wrongly assumes that avoiding a decision will avoid a bad outcome.

Start making the tough choices. Great leaders don’t fear decision-making, and in fact, thrive on the realization that it is necessary for success. They understand how critical it is to keep moving forward in a competitive market place. 

3. Embrace the risk of change. Nothing in business is more destructive than an unwillingness to change. Success in a competitive business environment demands that we keep progressing or face the reality of disaster. Even success requires us to embrace the risk of change.

My advice for strong leadership is be a benevolent advocate for change. Entrust those whom you lead to implement change, and change will become much easier for the reluctant to accept. Know that external change and innovation will be necessary to improve the value your company provides to clients. That’s how you meet the competition head-on, by constantly improving your value to customers.

Do not confuse innovation with invention; these are two distinct concepts. Innovation creates better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas. The key to innovation is to make something better, which doesn’t mean you have to invent something new.

The only requirement for something to be innovative is that it’s better than the alternative. This should come as a huge relief to you, knowing that you don’t have to build a new mousetrap. All you have to do is take an existing one and 
make it better.

4. Keep marketing and don’t stop. Marketing is an investment in your business’s future success and not an expense. Too often when times are lean, the first area shortsighted business leaders cut is the marketing budget. This is like failing to refuel a race car in the middle of a race. Choking off the fuel that powers a business to succeed creates a situation that makes revenues decline ever further and faster.

Marketing must be an ongoing strategy, not an on-demand one. Customers buy when they are ready to buy, not necessarily when you are ready to sell. Therefore, marketing must remain a continuous process.

Even when you are overloaded with business, keep marketing. Business is cyclical, and because customers control the purchases, your message must always be in front of them when they are ready to buy.

5. Stand in your own line. Know your customers’ experiences by experiencing them yourself. If it takes days to accommodate a customer’s request when it should take hours, you have a “line problem.” Clients have choices, and part of a customer’s perception of value is the experience. If the experience dealing with your business is unpleasant, the customer will find better value with a competitor.

Do not confuse customer service with customer experience, as customer service is just one component of the whole experience. A business owner must have the courage to undertake a holistic evaluation of every area within their company. This includes customer facing and internal processes, policies, and procedures.

Success does not mean we can relax, lose focus of customer value, or stop our forward progress. Growth requires us to step outside our comfort zone and make difficult choices. Keep your business “playing to win.” These five ways are sure strategies for long-term success.

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