Growing in the Dark: Why the Secret to Business Success Often Goes Unnoticed

Companies don’t just grow with shiny new products and client wins, but also from working more efficiently and maximising the impact of tech investments.

We all know the heroic legends, myths, fables and Harvard Business School case studies. Those gallant stories of companies that achieved astronomical growth thanks to a breathtaking product innovation or a blaze-of-light marketing strategy.

But in the realm of everyday business, growth is usually more down-to-earth – often occurring completely out of view. It encompasses all those small changes that add up to make a big difference – whether it’s tighter cost controls, incremental improvements in productivity, reductions in manual errors or measures to enhance efficiency. Because businesses, just like humans and certain plants, can do a lot of growing in the dark.

Indeed, while it’s obviously important to strive for big leaps in growth by pursuing transformative investments and new markets, savvy businesspeople understand that another engine of growth involves extracting more from your current operations, processes and customer base – and from maximising the impact of your investments in technology.

Natasha McCreesh, who runs the business coaching service PiP to Grow Strong, explains how companies can start doing more with what they already have. Typically, this involves improving margins by differentiating services and products for each market and simplifying purchasing procedures.

“One of the questions all businesses have to ask themselves is whether they’re selling their products or services with too many bells and whistles,” she says. “I helped a bath company realise they could save production costs on their range by cutting back on some of the parts and features found on their luxury range when selling to the lower-priced, white-label DIY market.”

This kind of product differentiation can be a useful way to avoid slipping into one common kind of business inefficiency: over-servicing. Sure, companies want to excel and be loved by their clients, but all too often it can mean margins are eroded to the point where they are virtually non-existent.

“Businesses need to run a profit-and-loss sheet on every client to see which ones they’ve [been] offering more to without charging [more],” McCreesh advises. “Often they’ll find there are some that are making very little margin for the business or are actually costing the business money to service. That’s where you need to be brave and have an honest conversation to cut back to what was originally agreed or request an increase in what they pay. You can only grow a business if you stop over-servicing.”

When it comes to improvements in efficiency, people tend to picture automated production lines and sweeping job cuts. But the history of commerce contains many inspiring examples of businesses that have raised their game simply by altering some of their processes. The car industry, for example, pioneered just-in-time manufacturing methods that can help businesses reduce the cost of holding excess inventory.

But you don’t need to be running a giant manufacturing operation in order to benefit from automating some basic business processes. For example, software solutions such as SAP Concur can help businesses as they grow by automating business admin task, including invoices and expenses. As well as being more efficient, it can mitigate against human error and fraud.

Moreover, automating these processes can help businesses claw back valuable time for their employees – liberating them from the kinds of menial admin tasks that can often curb their full potential.

It can be particularly useful to put in place automated solutions when a business starts approaching a key phase of transformation – for example, when a micro business starts evolving into an SME. This is when the right kind of systems can help a company to set itself up properly for the future – as opposed to makeshift measures that can cause hassle for a business as it expands.

Another often-overlooked way that a business can improve its efficiency as it expands is by fostering something called repeatability. After all, typically, a group of very talented people will have built a business from scratch only to struggle with the next stage of scaling up the company or making it more profitable. This is because each person has been working to their own strengths without the others fully knowing the processes involved.

Marianne Page, a business consultant and author, says that it can be very helpful here for an SME to think of itself as if it were a larger company with standardised and teachable processes and procedures. Page spent more than 20 years in senior management roles at McDonald’s and believes the chain’s central strategy of making processes repeatable is the key to growth in many businesses of all sizes. The premise was the guiding principle behind her business book Simple Logical Repeatable.

“A typical situation I find is that companies get to a certain level where an owner and their team of trusted execs have worked incredibly hard and have set up a great business,” she says. “The trouble comes after a while when they find the growth that came with their initial success slows down because they don’t realise that one of the secrets to business is repeatability. Everything that everyone does within a business, every process, needs to be identified and there needs to be a simple, repeatable, uniform way of doing it.

“It frees up companies to grow without necessarily signing up new customers because you end up servicing the ones you do have so much more efficiently.”

Another way to make more of your existing clients instead of focusing on winning and onboarding new customers, is to try to scale up your income from them. Of course, this is often easier said than done – after all, calling up clients and pitching cold can sound desperate and prove counter-productive.

For Jason Cobbold, chief executive of advertising agency BMB, the key to doing more work with what you already have is to do what he calls the “corridor walk”. “The best advice any business owner can take on board is to visit their clients a lot, or get their people to,” he says. “Business owners always think they’re front of mind with a client, but the truth is, they’re not. They also think they work for a client, but the truth is, you normally only work for a small part of what that client does. So you need to walk the corridors, get in there chatting with your contacts and get introduced to their colleagues and find out what they are working on so you are a familiar face they know can help out.”

SAP Concur provides intelligent solutions to help your business automate admin tasks such as expenses and invoices – giving you and your business the time and energy to focus on growing, innovating and making fruitful connections. To find out more about how SAP Concur can help you combine efficiency with intelligence, go to concur.co.uk