Business growth is essential to turning a startup into a long-term venture. With changing economic situations, personal goals, and unexpected twists and turns, you need to plan your business growth.
Brad Krauskopf has been running his own businesses for the past 20 years, and his most recent focus has been founding Hub Australia in 2011 and ensuring it’s growth.
With Brad as CEO, Hub Australia has grown and developed, using learnings from each new coworking space to improve processes and scale.
Hub Australia become one of the largest Australian-owned coworking providers, with over 3,500 members at its 7 locations.
Documenting processes, working out the pathway to each level of scaling, and creating the right business culture are important resources for you to feel confident in your plan for business growth.
Read more: Business growth with Six Park’s Ted Richards
Scaling your team:
Startups and small business owners often fall into a trap of taking on workloads themselves instead of employing new people.
This can be due to costs, time to recruit and train, and the perception that ‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’.
If a business wants to become self-sufficient, it’s essential to build an effective team to execute work and ensure everything is running as it should.
When hiring a new team, it’s important to focus on people power as well as processes and resources – hiring specialists is often more effective than potentially mismanaging things internally.
Accounting and legal must-haves:
If you’re looking to scale your business by bringing in investors, it’s important to start talking to advisors while in the startup phase.
Without advice and planning, you can potentially lock yourself out of government grants, be forced to pay penalties, or leave yourself open to legal issues as money becomes a focus.
A common mistake by founders is not having a formal agreement in place prior to incorporation. It’s important to cover equity structure, roles, milestones, and exit options from the beginning.
Read more: How to defeat the top 5 obstacles to scaling your business
Growing too quickly:
Companies often aim to be globally competitive or scale quickly, but the reality of entering new markets can be long and expensive.
Before expanding internationally you need a thorough knowledge of laws and regulations, as well as proven impact to know your product will ‘have legs’ in a new market and space.
Growing faster than you’re prepared for puts you at risk of being stretched financially and resource-wise – unless you have plans and a procedure to follow for growth, rapid expansion can be a risk.
Future-proofing your businesses for expansion may involve legal and financial advice and framework, as well as the creation of fallbacks and protections.
Read more: 5 Common Mistakes Startups Make In Structuring For Scale
Learn about government grants and assistance:
Research grants available in your field – writing them can be laborious, but there are experienced writers available, and it can be worth it with research and development tax incentives, commercialisation grants, incubator support grants and more.
As well as nationwide and federal grants, there are some specific to each state – it’s well worth researching!
