Of course you want your business to grow. It’s a sign of success, of progress. And it generally means the business is generating income, which is a good thing. You need to be profitable enough to keep going, even in a nonprofit endeavor. You can lose money for a while, but eventually, you’ll need to bring in more than you lay out in order to have long-term prospects. Growth is the way to get yourself to higher profitability and more exposure. That leads to more customers or users and more income. And so on.
In a perfect world, your business would grow at an even trajectory, a little bit at a time, month by month, so you could prepare for expenses, challenges, and improvements down the line. In the real world, things tend to move in fits and starts, with some growth spurts that you expect after a period of investment and hard work and others you didn’t anticipate. Sometimes business will be slow despite all your hard work. Don’t read too much into it. Just keep going.
THERE’S ANOTHER ASPECT OF GROWTH: CHANGE. Sometimes you can plan for changes, and other times the changes sneak up on you and force you to cede ground or be creative to get to the next stage. Growth can be unpredictable. It can take the form of two steps forward, one step back, but it’s also taking you to uncharted territory, which can be new, different, challenging, and great.
WRITE A FIVE-YEAR PLAN
START BY LISTING YOUR GROWTH GOALS. Are there certain numbers you want to reach? Is there a dollar amount in sales you’re aiming for? Do you hope to have a certain number of employees, or even just one person to help you get the work done? Think about your ideal scenario, the place you’d like to be in five years. Perhaps you’d like to be doing a little less of the sales and marketing yourself. Maybe you want some partners to share the financial part of the business and help in funding your growth. This is the time to think big, to imagine where you’d like your business to be someday. Don’t limit yourself by being overly realistic. Your growth goals can include markets you’d like to enter, ways you can make your business more diverse, and the office space you hope to call home.
For example, if you’re baking scones, maybe now you’re selling them to three cafés per week, baking every batch yourself, and using the kitchen at home. Your goals could include renting industrial kitchen space, hiring a baker or two to crank those scones out, selling them in your own pop-up shop on weekends, and getting them into Whole Foods in five years. Lofty goals, but there’s no reason you can’t achieve them. You have to start by setting the goals, then break them down into steps you’ll need to follow to get yourself there. You can divide your plan into one-year increments with an end point at the five-year mark, giving yourself smaller, more immediate goals that will help you get there.
START WITH BUDGETING THAT GROWTH. Find out how much rent you’ll pay on an industrial kitchen space and figure out how many hours you’ll need to use it. Calculate the cost of ingredients. Think about the wages you’d pay to your bakers. Consider what you might pay someone to do your sales and marketing if you’re too busy to do it yourself. Decide what roles you plan to continue to take on yourself. This is the foundation of a business plan. Business plans are important for showing potential investors and clients that you know what you’re doing and you’re prepared for what’s ahead—and they’re useful for keeping you on track even if you’re not showing it to anyone else yet. Check out the sample business plan in the appendix to see where to get started. You’ll document your success so far, your costs, your profits, and you’ll use those to estimate what your business could look like down the road. Investors will want to see that before they hand over their money. This kind of plan will allow you to finance your growth and reach your five-year goals.
GROWTH CAN ALSO SAVE YOU MONEY: SCALE IS KEY. If you can leverage (or average an expense across everything it funds) the cost of, say, a $20 paper cutter across 10 packages of letterpress stationery, then it costs $2 for each package in startup paper cutter costs. But if you can sell 100 packages of stationery cut by the same paper cutter, it only costs pennies per package. Sometimes growing bigger brings your expenses down, because many expenses are fixed no matter how small or big your business is. In other cases—like running a restaurant and needing to hire more employees as it expands—the more you grow, the more employees you’ll need and the higher your labor costs will be.
DON’T FREAK IF YOU DON’T GET THERE ON DAY ONE
It can take more time than we’d like to reach our goals, especially because once we’ve attained one, we keep moving the bar higher. Sometimes your path will take you to a place where you’re doing work for someone else in the interest of building your dream. Just stay focused on your goal and make every interaction an opportunity for learning and growth.
EVERYONE HEARS THE WORD NO. It’s just part of putting yourself out there and aiming high. There will be roadblocks, but remember that someone turning you down just means that one person didn’t fully understand the potential of your idea, or the timing wasn’t right, or that person was in a bad mood. There could be a million reasons—and you’ll never know what they are. Just tuck away whatever information you can glean from the experience and keep going. Don’t let no deter you from doing what you intend to do.
ADMIT YOU NEED HELP
It’s not a shortcoming to admit you can’t do it all yourself. It’s a sign of growth when you need to hire people. It can be hard to give up control. After all, in the early days of a business, you’re doing everything yourself. You’re controlling the brand image, doing the marketing, getting out there and selling, and most important, you’re creating the product. Once you get busier and your business grows robust, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
TAKE A HARD LOOK at all the hats you wear, all the parts of the business you work on daily. Make a list. Maybe some of it involves thinking and creating. Some may involve physically cranking out hammered silver necklaces or pints of homemade soup. Some may entail sitting at a computer and writing daily blog entries and other social media outreach. You’re dealing with expenses. You’re managing your money and budgeting for future costs. Start by prioritizing these jobs in order of your skills. No one is great at everything—you are better at some parts of your business that others. You also probably like certain parts more than others. You may love hand-screening T-shirts but hate doing the social media part of getting the word out. Or you may like making the T-shirt design, but the slogging through batches of dye is not your favorite part.
Decide which parts of the business you absolutely won’t let out of your clutches and which parts you wouldn’t mind having help with. Then begin pricing out the costs of finding help with those tasks. Decide how much you can afford by looking at how much time a particular job takes and how much of your time can be freed up for something better by delegating. If you can create 16 new T-shirt designs a week and your research shows there’s a demand for more designs, you may want to spend more of your time designing. If you can pay someone hourly to do your social media marketing, and that translates into selling a lot more shirts, it’s a good investment. Think about hiring people as a trade-off for growth. The more you can grow by hiring people, the more you’ll be able to grow—and hire more people.
DON’T HIRE JUST ANYONE
Deciding that you need to hire people is just the first step—deciding who to hire is its own challenge. It might seem tempting to hire the first person willing to do the job, but take a beat and remember that the people you hire are supposed to make your life easier. If you say yes to someone out of desperation, you may end up having the worst of both worlds: an employee you have to pay (or even fire) plus just as much work as you had before (or more if you have to work double time to fix mistakes).
WHEN IT COMES TO FRIENDS, hiring them might seem like a no-brainer—and if the friend you want to hire has the skills you’re looking for and the two of you have spent time together in intense situations before, great. But be honest. If you love your friend for her fashion savvy, her late-night advice, and her brain power when it comes to power studying for finals, make sure to stop and think about your friend as you’d view anyone who came to interview for the job. If you need someone for cutting and pasting photos on holiday cards and helping produce big bulk orders of stationery, but you know your friend tends to skim over details and hates crafty projects, is she really the best hire? Ask yourself how you’ll feel about her as an employee and a friend if she lets you down on the job. Is it worth risking your friendship? And is it worth potentially hurting your business when you could simply post an ad at a local school or online for the exact type of employee you need?
BY THE WAY, IT’S OKAY TO TURN SOMEONE DOWN IF IT’S NOT THE RIGHT FIT. Don’t feel like you’re being mean. You’ll feel a lot worse when you have to fire that person for not being up to the task. Just remember to be polite and kind about it.
WORKING WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY
Lots of people will be quick to say a very loud “Don’t do it!” Friends and business don’t mix, just like family and money. Keep them separate or you’ll risk losing both. But working with friends or family isn’t always a recipe for disaster. On the contrary, think about who really has your back: often it’s the people closest to you. Many of our Bosses have hired friends and family, especially while they’re still in school.
BE A GOOD BOSS
By now you know that when we talk about your employees, we’re including you in the mix. You, as employee #1, are the one who sets the tone for anyone else you have working for you or with you. The way you behave and the way you treat other people lets people know about you and your business. If you are a relentless taskmaster who never allows for a coffee break or a smile in the middle of the day, you may get productivity initially from the harsh crack of your whip, but you’ll find that over time, people stop responding to your autocratic nature.
Start by treating yourself well—and that means cutting yourself some slack. Back off on the harsh self-criticism. Take a moment to breathe and survey the business from a distance and assess where you are and where you’d like to go. You can be hardworking and driven without driving yourself insane. It’s the example you should be setting for anyone who does business with you and anyone who works with you. You are not just the boss of you, you are also your own role model. Be the kind of Boss you admire. That will allow you to be a better boss to other people.
WORK ON YOUR WEAKNESSES, WORK WITH YOUR STRENGTHS
Learning how to manage people is not easy. Being a boss is not the same as being a good boss. Some seem to be born with an innate sense of how to take charge of a group; others struggle at it. Some find it easy to speak in front of a group; others feel their throats contract when their voice is the only one in the room. Work with your strengths and work on your weaknesses. That means you should do what you know you’re good at but also try to improve at the things that challenge you.
Another important thing to realize is that you don’t do anything in a vacuum. In the same way your startup is an extension of yourself—your idea, your creativity, your brand—it’s also an extension of the way you approach the world. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So if you know you’re in beast mode when you put on skis, let that translate into the way you attack your sales pitch. If you are a champion debater, you’ll be the most well-spoken person in the room during your pitch. Let the areas where you’ve accomplished a lot in your life already fuel the areas where you’re just getting started.
REMEMBER YOU’RE NOT ALONE
Let people help you. It sounds obvious and easy, but when you start something and it’s your baby, it’s hard to let other people take parts of it off your hands. What if they do it wrong? What if they take the business you’ve spent countless hours getting just right and take it in a direction you don’t like? Here’s where you have to breathe. Here is where you practice the art of patience and remind yourself that starting and running a business is a process. You didn’t form your venture overnight, so the process of training people to help you with it won’t be instantaneous either. That just means you should be realistic with your expectations and cut everyone—yourself included—a bit of slack.
YOU GET OUT WHAT YOU PUT IN
You need to take time to get things right. Put in the time it takes to train people to do things your way. It may feel like you’re spending valuable time teaching when you could be spending that time doing, but remember the old proverb: If you give someone a fish, she’ll eat for one meal. If you teach her to fish, she’ll eat for a lifetime. Teach people working with you how you want them to do things and they’ll be able to take the reins from there. Choose your employees carefully, spend a little time with them, then take a step back and let things unfold. Go back and make corrections if necessary. You’ll find that if you’ve chosen people who understand your mission, you’ll be able to train them in no time. They will probably surprise you and bring new ideas you never thought of. Welcome those ideas. Soon you’ll have a team that can’t be stopped.
BE GOOD TO YOUR EMPLOYEES
A happy boss can lead a happy startup. You need to take that goodwill you gained from being good to yourself and apply it to all the people who work for you. Remember, they are helping you further your idea and your creation. Even though they may be getting paid, they are spending their time helping you. Think about inexpensive things you can do to make your employees feel good about their jobs. Maybe you can buy lunch or treats for your employees once in a while. Make your workspace a fun and positive place to spend time. Letting someone work at home sometimes doesn’t cost you a thing and may gain you higher productivity. Someone who appreciates the freedom to telecommute once in a while may repay the kindness by doing a bang-up job on the work—and remaining loyal to your company longer.
Being good to your employees doesn’t only mean giving them perks. Think of your workplace as a second home. No one wants to live in a house where people scream at each other and tension is thick. No one wants to work at a place like that either. Do your best to keep any personal baggage out of the workplace, and let the only drama be waiting to hear if you’ve made a big sale. It seems obvious, but there are many bosses and employees out there who don’t know where to put the boundary between their personal lives and their work lives. It creates an uncomfortable environment for everyone.
CREATE A CULTURE THAT REPRESENTS YOU
BE AWARE OF THE CULTURE YOU’RE CREATING. Think about companies you admire and try to emulate them. Do they have a ride-share service, a stocked fridge, or educational speakers? What kinds of policies and ideas would create a place that you would want to work?
If you like to collaborate around big conference room tables for six hours at a time and have everyone order in lunch, you are creating a different kind of culture than someone who likes to have everyone work at home and telecommute. If you do your best thinking on walks and you choose a workspace with windows that open for fresh air, you’re creating a different culture than a business where everyone sits in low-walled cubicles and can see and hear everyone working around them. None of these are inherently good or bad models. Your business culture needs to represent you and the type of environment that makes you and the people you work with the most productive and happy.
THINK ABOUT HOW YOUR TEAM WORKS TOGETHER. Does everyone require peace and quiet to think and write? Do people need communal spaces to collaborate? Try to incorporate this type of efficiency into your work environment as well.
Your business culture is a combination of the physical office space you have—whether it’s your garage or a swanky rented loft space—and less tangible aspects like ethics and communication style. Some bosses hate to hear criticism of any kind. Maybe they feel like criticism cuts down the thing they are trying to create, or they view it as a form of disloyalty. Other bosses set regular meetings for feedback, always looking to fine-tune and adjust business practices based on what is working and what isn’t. Think about how you feel about criticism. Does it make you feel insecure? It’s pretty normal if it does, so maybe you don’t want to hear it in person. Maybe you want to send out anonymous surveys from time to time. Try not to shy away from constructive feedback. It’s very easy to grow nearsighted when we’re working closely on a venture and forget to see it in context. Rely on people you trust to give you that perspective and to help you work out the kinks.
