There are a number of moving components in every business. Hiring the right people, investing in the right productivity tools, adopting the right growth strategy and finding the right price point are just a few of them.
The challenges associated with each of these components are exacerbated in a fast growing startup. This is because business owners have little time to react to challenges and fix them before they encounter larger problems. In the absence of a focused strategy, a fast growing startup is doomed to fail.
One of the most effective ways to handle growth in a startup is by automating the processes. With the right startup tools, businesses can avoid the friction that comes with scaling up manual resources. Automation also brings down the moving components in a business and this helps with better control of the entire business cycle.
In this article, we will take a look at various elements of a business and how they can be automated.
Support management
The first thing an entrepreneur notices when their business grows is the dramatic increase in the number of support calls and inbound customer enquiries. Taking calls personally from customers or prospective clients is alright when you are still a small operation. But switching all of this process to trained employees can be pretty resource intensive since hiring support staff can be time consuming.
To manage a sudden growth in your business, you may look at hiring a virtual office company. These companies help your business scale by taking time-consuming tasks off your plate, like a virtual receptionist service that handles inbound calls and schedules meetings. Other services include an office address for business setup, meeting room rental, and help finding flexible coworking space for your growing workforce.
Recruitment
The biggest pain point in a fast growing startup is human resource management. Finding quality workers to hire is challenging enough. Add to this the need to manage training of your existing workforce, and the process can become overwhelming real fast.
A recruitment management software and applicant management system can go a long way in making life easier for your business. The ideal recruiting software will handle everything from managing the marketing and distribution of openings across various job portals and social media channels, aggregating applications from various sources, tracking the status and interview process for every applicant and also providing you with the right analytical tools to analyze and improve your recruitment process.
Hiring quality workers for your business is only the first step. Studies show that workers who have not been adequately trained tend to quit your organization real fast. Pick an employee training software that can automate employee onboarding and ongoing training requirements for your business. The ideal training software may also come equipped with the tools to onboard your customers with the same solution.
Collaboration
Project managers typically take care of the communication across various departments running a project. However, in a fast growing startup, there could be multiple projects running at the same time. Juggling between these tasks could be quite overwhelming even for the most experienced project managers.
Pick a project management tool that not only distributes tasks among your team members and enables seamless communication, but also makes it easy for a project manager to visualize progress with the help of charts and reports. In addition to this, if your team works with contract workers, it is also a good idea to pick a project management tool that comes equipped with time tracking features. Not only does it ensure timely delivery of projects, but also helps you in identifying areas of improvement in efficiency and working on them.
Automate customer feedback
Fast growing startups routinely fall into the trap of working on managing growing order volumes at the expense of user experience. This is an invitation to competitors to fill the void and is thus a reason for customers to switch. Capturing customer feedback and earnestly working on them is thus absolutely critical to the continued success of a startup.
The customer feedback process can be automated with the help of online survey software applications. These tools help a business ask pertinent questions to their customer at each stage of their lifecycle. The inputs garnered from such surveys can then be aggregated to find problem areas to work on.
For example, if an NPS survey reveals a dwindling rating for the business’ services, then a marketer can seek further inputs from customers to identify the reason and work on them. Such surveys can also be used for market research and questions related to low repeat rates, loyalty and pricing.
Automate finances
A business transaction can involve a lot of paperwork. This includes creating invoices, payment receipts, P/L statements, and so on. Most organizations have moved away from maintaining physical documents to online alternatives today. However, there is still a number of inefficiencies in the system.
For instance, you may automate the accounting process so that when an invoice is paid, it is automatically updated to your books. Similarly, if you offer standard services to your clients, you may set up a recurring payment system so that you do not have to spend time creating new invoices each month.
When you pick the right billing and invoicing tool, it will come equipped with all these different features so that your organization needs to expend minimal manual resources regardless of how many transactions you process in a month or how many customers you handle.
Automate your sales process
One area that a lot of businesses fail at when it comes to automation is sales and marketing. Many businesses continue to associate automation with spam marketing. Blasting hundreds of cold outreaches every day may ruin your organization’s credibility and can in fact bring your conversion rate down.
Finding the right email address or contact number to reach out to and sending a personal message can deliver a dramatically higher conversion rate on your outreach. Pick a tool that can offer both these credentials at the same place so that this process can be made seamless for a fast growing startup.
Now over to you!
What other areas of business do you think must be automated in order to succeed as a fast growing startup? Share your thoughts in the comments.