Dealing with Change as Your Company Grows

While most entrepreneurs hope their fledgeling business will one day grow into a multi-national corporation, making the transition from being the head of a small, tightly-knit team to overseeing a large number of employees working across a range of departments can often present a host of unexpected challenges. The following tips will ensure you are ready to pay the price of success.

Expect conflict

Just because you have hired the best possible people for every leadership role in your company doesn’t mean they are all going to get along all the time. As the departments become larger and more focused on their individual areas, there is an increased chance some of they may end up at odds. Perhaps the marketing team is pushing for one set of goals while the sales team wants to go another way. Perhaps the technology team want to spend more time developing an upgrade to your product, but the finance team insist the money is better spent elsewhere.

You may have once been solely responsible for all such decisions, but you now need to adjust your leadership style to ensure that everyone from all the key areas of your business has a voice and is able to participate in company decisions. Foster an atmosphere of trust between the key personnel of the leadership team so they are more willing to work together to achieve whatever is best for the company.

Add by subtracting

As your company grows, many of the systems and procedures you had in place in the early days will no longer be effective and may even begin holding you back. Focus on finding new strategies to maintain and accelerate growth. For example, one senior VP of HR at Adobe eliminated the need for employees to produce performance reports, allowing them to devote their time to something more productive instead.

You should also look for ways to replace any element of your business that isn’t working as well as it should. At Twitter, team members were made to hand over their phones during meetings, and the meetings became far shorter and far more effective as a result.

Upgrade your software and systems

When the time comes to invest in specialist software for your business, ensure your system is modular so you can simply add to it, rather than having to start over from scratch. Although such a system may initially cost more, you’ll make huge savings in the long run, both in monetary terms and in terms of the time you save by not having to retrain staff.

In the very early days of your enterprise, especially one in the manufacturing sector, you are likely to have only a few facilities and a small number of maintenance workers and managers. Once your company begins growing and starts to purchase or lease a number of large, expensive pieces of manufacturing equipment, you’ll need to invest in enterprise asset management software to provide a clear, big-picture view of the operation.

Such software will give you the ability to compare asset performance and the relative costs of different facilities while also keeping tabs on regulatory compliance, both across facilities, departments and locations, and without it, your business will not be able to continue to succeed.