Your Business - It's Not Just About Growth - Chris Dowling Business Consultant & Mentor

Your Business – It’s Not Just About Growth

It’s not just growth that a business owner should be concerned about; looking beyond growth is crucial. Don’t fall into the trap of only being concerned about sales and turnover.

Turnover doesn’t measure the health of a business

Turnover simply tells you how much you have sold and the money that has passed through your hands, but it says nothing about your profit. High revenue and sales often disguises high operational costs, bad cash flow, zero efficiency and little or no profit.

Your infrastructure and systems may start to crack

When you focus solely on scaling your numbers and chasing more sales, your infrastructure is usually the first thing to crack. Fast growth puts a strain on your customer service, burns out your team, compromises the quality of delivery and creates cash flow problems as working capital is stretched. Processes that once worked well, can start to cause problems as the business grows.

If your systems cannot handle a sudden surge in demand, any growth will damage your well-earned reputation. Instead, measure the capacity of your operations and customer satisfaction. So long as you are able to deliver excellence consistently, growth will happen.

The chase for growth often causes businesses to fail and all too often people think more and more growth will fix everything – that’s not the case. Instead, you should focus on your margins and profitability, cash flow, overheads and costs, capacity and all round resilience.

Build a better business

Start by understanding whether the business is getting enough benefit and positive outcomes from its current operations and processes.

Identify the areas where your business may be weak. Is your marketing right and sufficiently active, are your prices competitive, are you buying supplies at the best prices, are staff motivated and trained? All of these lead to the amount of profitability in the business. Check them and fix them and you will start to see measurable and noticeable differences.

A strong business is one that uses its resources well and efficiently, makes sound business decisions and delivers an excellent standard of work – all of this without everything becoming complicated as the business gets bigger.

Getting a fresh perspective on your business

As a business consultant and mentor, my job isn’t just to help you build a bigger business, it’s to help you build a better one. I will help you to understand if the business is getting enough value from what it’s already doing and bring a fresh perspective.

If you are a business owner looking to save time, reduce costs overall and improve profit, contact me to see how I will help you to achieve this. Get in touch for a free conversation today – by phone on 07885 685641 or by email – chris@dowlingbusinessmentor.co.uk