If you’re a small business owner or an entrepreneur who has successfully formed a company, you’ll know that the first few years of trading can be incredibly difficult. Just to survive as an organization past the first two or three years can be a major achievement in the current trading environment.
In the early years, there’s a significant need to gain a market share, ensure that you can compete effectively with your rivals, and aim to increase your revenue streams. Once these milestones have been reached, it can be the ideal time to look for ways to expand your operations and enjoy sustainable business growth.
This article is aimed at business owners who are seeking expansion without sacrificing profitability. It includes three vital considerations that will be of benefit to a wide range of different growing enterprises.
1. Consider your business applications
When businesses grow, they commonly need to expand their IT infrastructure to support new teams and to undertake a wider range of business activities. In the digital age of business, this often involves using a wider range of applications and microservices. Many leading businesses prefer to create microservices that communicate with each other in their IT infrastructure as they’re easier to deploy and can be maintained more effectively with minimal disruption to other services.
However, there’s a need in any growing firm to effectively manage their microservices and ensure that they communicate and perform effectively. To facilitate this, companies use service mesh such as service mesh kubernetes.
Simply put, this is the layer of programming software that handles all the communications between microservices in business applications. It’s a vital layer, especially when you consider that different services may have been built with a varying range of programming languages. Service mesh effectively holds these systems together and the use of this software is vital as your business expands into the cloud.
2. Investigate outsourcing opportunities
As previously mentioned, a growing business will need to increase the number of specialist teams and departments that it uses to further its business development goals. However, this doesn’t necessarily need to be achieved by employing new staff directly.
Growing firms should consider outsourcing to increase the scope of their operations. This is where an outside team is employed to undertake specific roles for the company. There are several key benefits of outsourcing, which include having access to highly skilled staff who have the latest industry-specific knowledge.
This business practice can also help growing companies to reduce their costs as they expand. With outsourcing, there’s less need to have physical premises such as offices for the workforce and this can help businesses to minimize their operating costs as they expand.
3. Embrace remote working practices
A growing organization should take advantage of opportunities for remote working. Several recent studies have found that remote workers can be more productive than their workplace-based counterparts. Millions of staff relish the opportunity to undertake remote working practices as it saves them commuting time and can help them to be less fatigued after the working week.
As with outsourcing, remote working reduces the need for physical office premises (thus keeping costs low) and can help to reduce the carbon footprint of an organization.
