As an entrepreneur with an operational startup, the last thing you dread is your business growing at an uncertain and lumbering pace. Similarly, you should watch out since rapid startup growth often leads to another set of challenges. How to grow your business in a lean way.
Growing Your Business in a Lean Way
It is a good idea to ensure that your enterprise grows at a healthy pace with more chances of success. This can only be achieved by growing your business in a lean way. For beginners, how can you achieve this? The guide below outlines some insightful tips making your company lean.
What is a Lean Business Model?
Lean business models are a savior in the current world full of bloated businesses that exploit every resource and focus their efforts and energy in the wrong directions. The primary goal of lean businesses is to maximize the value of every resource while minimizing waste. As such, lean thinking enterprises aim to improve various processes to ensure that they deliver optimized products and services to customers while eliminating waste.
For startups, lean businesses growth involves shortening products and services development cycles to determine whether the business model is feasible or not. As such, most entrepreneurs introduce several cost-effective measures to save money while promoting business efficiency through all the development stages.
Note that even if you didn’t start your startup with a lean method in mind, there are several practical ways of transforming your business into a lean model.
Tips for Lean Business Growth
There are many misconceptions about lean. Staying lean involves lowering your expenses and avoiding unnecessary financial activities. Below are some ways to achieve this.
Try Before Outsourcing
Most conventional startups are advised to outsource as much as possible to focus on core business responsibilities and internal resources. While this is prudent, it may not be the best approach when growing a lasting business. Using the best practices for outsourcing various tasks in your business will only help it grow faster and not leaner.
When outsourcing specific tasks to third parties, you can make costly mistakes that infringe on your budget. Besides, you miss the opportunity of learning how to handle various business tasks by yourself. This can easily lead to surreal expectations and heavy dependence on external forces for your business growth. That said, outsourcing isn’t a bad idea, but you should consider trying something before offloading.
Automate Where Possible
Most people confuse between outsourcing and automating their businesses. Lean business growth requires extensive automation but with oversight. Using proper automation tools will enable you to streamline several mundane tasks that are time-consuming. That aside, you get to keep these technical tasks in-house.
Fortunately, you can choose what to automate, how much to automate, and when to automate. This is a controlled method of handling arduous tasks happening in your startup regularly. Some of the best processes to automate include email management, sales processes, client onboarding, and calendar management.
Prioritize Workplace Culture Over Employee Perks
Most trendy technical startups cannot be compared to Silicon Valley in terms of their professional business approach. Most of these businesses offer various perks, such as free catered meals, office nap pods, music recording studios, and stocked bars. Such shouldn’t be the case if you want to pursue lean business growth.
In reality, most employees don’t care about having a recording studio or a napping place in their work time. While this may seem appealing to job applicants, these inconsequential perks are costly to your business. Instead of setting up all these, invest in developing a warm and magnetic work culture that draws employees.
Interestingly, most employees don’t think about perks when deciding if they should quit to take another job offer or remain in your company. Instead, they consider the intangibles at their work, such as a supportive community, opportunity to grow, and flexibility. Creating a strong company culture makes it easy to attract and retain great talent.
Opt for Organic Marketing
Unfortunately, there is no “enough” budget for marketing. This is because you can send 100% of your monthly allocations on marketing but still feel you are not doing enough. Therefore, instead of throwing a lot of money to market your business, which produces results only when you keep spending, focus on organic marketing, which produces sustainable results.
A good example of organic marketing is content marketing, which is an excellent long-term investment compared to pay-per-click marketing. Even after you have stopped paying for this content, your business will benefit in terms of SEO, lead generation, and traffic. Note that content marketing will only excel if you have a good website that provides better user experiences. You can take a course on UX/UI design to improve these aspects of your website.
Grow Your Business in a Lean Way
Even though the phrase “lean business model” might be subjective to some, the basic principles remain the same. Any lean business should focus on meeting the constantly changing customer needs with lean quality products while minimizing overhead costs. Lean businesses also have high profitability and seamless scalability. The tips mentioned above can help your business achieve these features.