Growing a business is challenging. It’s even more challenging when your expenses grow just as fast as your revenue. Is there a better way?
What Does It Mean to Be Lean?
We use the word “lean” to describe businesses that maximize value while simultaneously minimizing waste.
As Planview explains, “A lean business model focuses on improving processes across the value stream in order to eliminate waste and deliver optimized value to the customer. This can help teams and organizations achieve their goals in smarter, more sustainable ways.”
Lean businesses are focused on optimization and iteration. They obsess over quality (and don’t worry so much about quantity). Fast delivery, scalable processes, and strong hiring are also core characteristics of lean organizations.
4 Tips for Lean Growth
Achieving lean growth is often easier said than done. However, if you approach it from the right angle and know which areas of your business to emphasize, you can get good results. Here are several helpful tips:
1. Get Focused
It’s extremely important that you focus your energy and efforts. It’s better to do a couple of things exceptionally well than a dozen things poorly. This requires you to say no more than you say yes.
When your business is just starting out, it’s tempting to say yes to everything. After all, you don’t want to turn away clients or burn bridges. But for every yes, you’re actually saying no to other things that could be more beneficial to your long-term growth.
It’s also important to be focused on your marketing strategy. With so many different options – including email, social media, SEO, blogging, podcasting, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. – you run the risk of spreading your time and resources too thin. This may lead to watered-down branding. You must pick and choose which channels to focus on.
When it comes to social media, it would be better to focus 100 percent of your social media marketing on one platform – say Instagram – and to build up a loyal audience on that platform. Then you can expand over time as you see fit.
When it comes to advertising, you’re better off mastering one network before trying another—for example, getting really good at Facebook advertising before trying your hand at Google AdWords. This focused approach generates better results across the board.
2. Use Variable Staffing
Most businesses make the mistake of hiring a full team right off the bat and then suffer the consequences of trying to keep them busy. As an alternative, you should use a variable staffing model.
“Staff your business for the valleys and supplement with contractors for the peaks,” entrepreneur Joanne Markow advises. “Too often startups take their funding or early revenue and hire staff too quickly. It’s smart to use a variable staffing model to cover services effectively and find that quality mix of people on staff, contract or freelancing.”
With variable staffing, you don’t have to worry about overextending your business. You’re able to perfectly manage the natural ebbs and flows of your business in a way that doesn’t compromise customer service, product quality, or the bottom line.
3. Leverage Outsourcing
Outsourcing is an ideal option when you don’t have the internal resources to handle a task that your business must complete. It’s also good for ongoing needs that require regular servicing.
IT is a great example of a process that usually falls outside of a company’s core set of competencies and makes for a good outsourcing candidate. IT companies like Palmtech can streamline this aspect of running a business while you focus on things like marketing and sales.
4. Be Tactful With Budgeting
Lean businesses aren’t necessarily cheap, but they are smart about their spending. The more tactful you are with your budget, the more room there will be for growth.
Cutting overhead costs is a great place to start. In this day and age, remote working is an extremely practical option. If possible, find a way to reduce square footage and take your team virtual, or at least pivot to a hybrid model.
Adding It All Up
Growth for the sake of growth can be dangerous and, ironically enough, detrimental to your business over the long run. Contrary to popular belief, bigger isn’t always better. If you’re going to grow, make sure you’re doing so in a lean, scalable way.