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Category - Small Business

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1
Managing A Mature Business – How To Keep Innovating
2
Managing A Mature Business – Managing Cash Flow
3
Growing Your Business By Setting It Up To Scale
4
Growing Your Business By Employing With Intent
5
Growing Your Business By Growing Your Employees

Managing A Mature Business – How To Keep Innovating

This is the second in our series of articles on managing a mature business.

If you missed the first article, about managing the cash flow of a mature business, you can click on this link.

We have also completed our series of articles on Starting A Small Business and on Growing Your Business, and the links provided will take you to the first articles of those series if you missed them.

In this week’s article, we are (hopefully) going to recognise that your business has reached the mature stage in its life cycle, and look to renew the cycle before it drips into the next stage, which is the stage of decline!

But first, let’s refresh our memories to talk about the four stages of the business life cycle: –

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Managing A Mature Business – Managing Cash Flow

This is the first in our series of blog posts about Managing A Mature Business.

In case you missed it, we completed a set of 7 posts about Starting A Small Business, from making sure you know your Purpose to how to start up, to preparing a feasibility check, planning and hiring your first employee, and you can catch up by going to teikoh.com. We have also just completed another 7 part series on Growing Your Business from learning about Key Performance Indicators for your growing business to marketing, working with employees and making sure you have the systems to scale. You can also look for it on our website at teikoh.com.

In a business, at any stage of its life, cash flow is an extremely important part of that business’ lifeline and will always need to be managed.

However, in a mature business, the cash flow pattern is more challenging. The business is no longer growing, in some cases it is stagnant and while you may have reduced investment needs, the cash that is generated through a mature and stagnant level of sales may not be replenishing the “catching up” of cash outflows that you were experiencing before.

There are four stages of a business cycle, being startup, growth, maturity, and potentially decline.

In the startup stage, sales are low in volume but grow quickly. In the growth stage, sales are beyond the break-even point and both sales and profits are increasing. In the mature stage, the rate of growth slows down and cash flows become relatively stagnant.

If you are not managing your cash in maturity, in order to invest in innovation and new products and services to kick off the next growth phase, you may enter the decline phase where all sales, profit and cash flow decline until you exit the business.

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Growing Your Business By Setting It Up To Scale

When you start your business, and as it grows, you will have a picture in your mind about where it will end up as your successful business.

The chances are that you see a business that grows and is prosperous, efficient, duplicating what it does for your clients now, but on a much larger scale, and repeating your success in bigger contexts.

This doesn’t happen by chance. You need to plan it, you need to set it up correctly so that it will scale efficiently rather than in fits and starts and discover all sorts of inefficiencies and roadblocks to growth along the way.

We will look at the steps you need to take, right now, before the growth spurts start, to set up your business to scale.

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Growing Your Business By Employing With Intent

Last fortnight, we dealt with how to grow your business by making sure that your employees grow with you – by providing them with a clear Position Description that detailed their goals, objectives and responsibilities, and performance measures, and by ensuring that you implement a consistent feedback system to review their performance.

This fortnight, we are going to look at how to employ people with intent. That is, knowing exactly who you need to employ, what their roles are and how these people will populate your complete business structure.

This means designing what your business will look like, from the beginning, and in doing this, knowing what your organisational structure will look like when your business structure is complete.

To do this, we are going to look at designing your Organisation Chart.

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Growing Your Business By Growing Your Employees

Typically, small businesses employ a small number of people before they expand and grow.

As small businesses grow, the way they develop and grow their people will help them grow their business as well. So, the performance of those people in the early years is fundamental to the performance of the business as it grows.

Therefore your small business should attempt to ensure the best performance from your employees, and systems to help them grow and develop along with your business.

The best way of developing your employees is to implement an effective review system where they are shown what their key performance indicators are, where they can be given clear targets to achieve, and where positive but honest feedback can be given both ways so that they are helped to develop and that they provide feedback to you on how you can best use them in your business.

In order to implement an effective staff performance review system, you first need to have something against which to measure. Read More

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