Dreaming of expanding your business?
Scaling can be fun. Scaling brings more customers, more revenue, and more growth opportunities. But there’s a problem…
If your operations aren’t streamlined, growing your business will quickly become overwhelming.
Every growing company reaches a point where their processes fail. What worked with five employees looks downright ridiculous with fifty. Too many systems. Too much confusion. Everyone is working harder with little to show for it.
The good news? Solving these problems is much simpler than you might think. By prioritising Business Central Financial Management and streamlined operations your growing company can scale without breaking.
Read on to learn:
- Why operations slow when you start scaling
- How much inefficiency is costing you
- How financial management supports scalability
- Building scalable systems for your growing company
Why Operations Slow When You Start Scaling
Here’s a fun fact that will blow your mind…
The exact same processes that helped your business achieve $1 million in revenue are holding you back from $10 million.
Crazy, right? Sort of. When you look at why processes degrade during growth, it starts to make perfect sense.
Startup companies are built on hustle and informal communication. Nobody knows everything but everybody knows enough to get the job done. Informal communication works at small scale. But as soon as you start adding personnel, job roles become blurred and workflows are changed on-the-fly instead of being designed proactively.
For growing companies looking to implement scalable Business Central financial management solutions, streamlined processes are essential to success.
So what happens instead?
Your teams are put into overdrive just to keep the current systems moving. It’s like running in place. The effort required to operate grows exponentially, but your operations don’t.
How Much Inefficiency Is Costing You
Want to talk about bad news?
Running inefficient operations costs money.
According to research from McKinsey and Bain & Company, 20-30% of annual operating expenditure is lost to things like rework, miscommunications, and siloed technology. That could mean $100k or more going out the window every year for most mid-sized companies.
Operational inefficiency also causes:
- Lost time. Hours of employee time are wasted on manual tasks that can be automated
- Bad decisions. Fragmented data leads leaders to make conclusions with incomplete information
- Lost opportunities. When employees are bogged down with unnecessary work, they can’t focus on growing your business
The longer inefficiencies are allowed to grow, the worse they become. It’s a cycle that’s hard to stop.
How Financial Management Helps Your Company Scale
But how can you avoid growing pains as your business scales?
By investing in strong Business Central Financial Management.
Think investing in financial management software is only for catching errors in your accounting department? Think again.
Robust financial management helps you make smarter scaling decisions. Questions like:
- Where are we losing money?
- What products or services are actually profitable?
- Do we have the funds to hire more staff?
- What would happen if one of our biggest clients left tomorrow?
Your growing company can’t afford to fly-blind through the scaling process. Automation through ERP backed financial management helps you ask these questions and find answers.
Here’s an insane statistic:
30% of organizations choose ERP software specifically for better financial management capabilities. Companies that invested in ERP financial management knew what they were doing. Scaling without visibility into your financial health is a house of cards.
Business Central Financial Management bundles your accounting, inventory, sales, and operations into a single streamlined system. Gone are the days of siloed spreadsheets and hunting down data points. Modern ERP technology brings you seamless visibility into the true performance of your growing business.
Building Systems that Scale With Your Growing Company
But how do you actually build processes that can scale with your growing company?
Start by integrating your tools.
Imagine this: You’ve hired ten more people to support your growing business. It’s bringing more stress to your current staff, so you delegate. You bring in a new CRM to give your sales team better customer insights. You implement project management software to help your growing operations team juggle the larger workload. Sound familiar?
Now your employees are spending all of their time entering data that gets duplicated everywhere. Not only does this create inefficiency, but it also slows your processes down.
Here’s a better way.
Invest in technology that grows with your company. When you pick an ERP system that supports every aspect of your business — from supply chain to sales — your data lives in one single system. Your teams aren’t bogged down with transferring info. Instead, they have more time to make meaningful improvements to your business.
Below are just a few places to start:
Automate Repeatable Processes
Any process that requires manual entry is a problem.
Invoicing. Inventory tracking. Report generation. Don’t overlook the scalable systems that take your employees focus off of busywork and back to the business.
Document your workflows
Growing companies should have written processes. Not because your employees aren’t capable of thinking for themselves. Rather, documented workflows create great consistency at scale.
When your teams have clearly defined responsibilities that are uniformly executed, your quality levels will remain high no matter who is doing the work. Plus, your new hires will have an easier time getting acclimated and your managers will have more time to do…well…manage.
Centralise your financial data
This is where Business Central Financial Management comes into play.
Your finances should be viewable at your fingertips. When you have all of your financial information stored in one single ERP system, your leaders can see exactly what’s going on financially. No waiting for monthly statements to discover what happened two weeks ago.
With real-time visibility into your financials, you can scale your growing company with confidence.
Monitor Key Performance Metrics
I didn’t say everything. Monitoring your key metrics will vary depending on your industry. However, there are a few metrics every growing company should monitor.
Sales per employee, customer acquisition cost, and cash conversion cycles are just a few metrics that will tell you if your operations are scaling efficiently.
Wrapping It All Up
Scaling your company is more than just gaining new customers or hiring more staff.
Scaling means having operations that can handle that new growth.
That starts with:
- Accepting that your startup processes don’t cater for growth
- Knowing how inefficiency is costing your growing company
- Making Business Central Financial Management a priority
- Implementing technology that can adapt with your growth
Companies that prioritise scalable systems as they grow don’t just expand. They expand gracefully. Spending more time focusing on beating the competition than wrestling with their own internal systems.
Want your business to be the former? Streamlined operations are the first step.