As someone who leads a service-based business, you spend a lot of time acquiring new leads, bringing in new clients, and delivering work that make your clients love you. While your client interactions play a huge role in their desire to engage in repeat business with you, there’s a lot that goes on in the background of your company that affects if the projects or work you’re delivering are actually profitable and scalable. No matter the size of your business, creating processes and workflows that are built for growth and that give you the flexibility to scale your operations as you continue to delight clients is key if you want to maintain quality - without buckling under the pressure.
To help set you up for success, here are a few tips for how to create business processes that drive growth while keeping your business running like a self-driving car, so that you can grow - without the growing pains.
When you think about building your business for growth, it’s not simply a matter of bringing in more clients to drive more revenue - it’s about optimizing your operations so that you can spend more time on servicing your clients (work that drives revenue) instead of non-billable and repetitive tasks, like admin or busywork. If you’re manually trying to keep track of what everyone on your team is working on now, and manually setting reminders to follow up with clients, or setting milestones and deadlines for projects, you need to think critically about how you’ll continue to do that if one day you double or triple your clientele. While you can always hire more people to take on some of that admin work and manage those projects, hiring is expensive. But - when you think with a growth mindset, you start to think about how you can optimize - how you can automate - some of the things you’re doing now to keep your business running so that when the time comes to take on more clients, you can do so with ease, while the processes you set in place continue to run smoothly and run the business in the background. That’s where Accelo's automation comes in. When you build your business on a platform that’s built to help you reach success, day by day, you have the time to focus on the work that matters most - your clients - while things like follow-ups, data entry, payments, billing, project milestones, and deadline reminders manage themselves. By maximizing automation with Accelo's progression actions and workflows that you set in place, your business will be able to grow, but without things fall through the cracks.
Let me ask you this - can you easily answer, from a single glance, what everyone on your team is working on today? Maybe you can if you’re a team of five, maybe even ten. But - what happens when your projects double, or you open a second office? What about some of your team members who are working remotely? Being able to have a clear view of what’s going on in your business, both in terms of client communications, resource utilization (i.e. how much of your team’s time is being spent on current projects) and if you’re going to hit all of your milestones (or not, and get notified in time to do something about it) is key if you’re going to keep growing without dropping the ball or buckling under the pressure.
You need to be able to provide strong tracking and collaboration around sales, projects, issues and more so that you can foster company-wide transparency. Not only will this keep everyone at the company on the same page as you continue to grow, but with everything streamlined into one client work management platform, you’ll have one source of truth for the answers you’re looking for - no he said she said, and no information leaks. Best of all, you’ll save time (and money) by not scrambling for data and jumping between tools.
If you want to understand your client’s customer journey, think about a blueprint for the service your business provides. You’ve got physical evidence, like a website, customer actions, like your first touch point and communications with them, front stage actions, like all the work you and your team do in the background do deliver projects and client work that’s delightful, and support processes, like customer service training, credit card processing, and so on.
If you want to build your business for growth, thinking about repeat business is key. It takes a lot of time and energy to bring in new leads and clients, and so once you do get their business, you want to nurture that relationship and develop a profitable client relationship with things like retainers, contracts, and repeat work. In order to get that repeat business, you need to delight your clients. This might sound trivial, but making sure you build a scalable process for how you handle and nurture clients is key if you want to grow without letting important relationships go un-touched or fall through the cracks. When you have a streamlined platform that integrates your client communications with the work you’re doing for them, one that also loops in the rest of your team for great collaboration, everyone knows exactly when the last time someone was contacted, what the deliverables are, where a project stands, and if things were paid for yet or not. When you have all of this information in one simple place, you’re able to focus on your client relationships and reach out when you need to, and never drop the ball or underdeliver - which is critical for repeat business.
If you have a growth mindset and you’re looking for ways to build growth into your business processes so that you can continue to grow, but without the growing pains, start a free trial of Accelo today and see how it can take your business to the next level.
