When your business is growing, it demands more of you. It requires much of your time, energy, and ideas. You need to be quick to decide and to adjust especially when your business is rapidly expanding.
As expansion of your business comes to a head, the company will require a higher level of organization in order to function efficiently.
When only you and maybe a few workers constitute a business, the requirements are minimal. But say you want to diversify services or expand operations, things need to pick up in a significant way.
This is where you want to start thinking about adding departments to your business. This way, you can streamline production by compartmentalizing all tasks, and running your business as sum of all its operations.
It may seem easy to just create a department and let it run on its own. However, It requires tons of planning to ensure everything falls into place.
To help you out, here are the basic steps to effectively expand a business with the introduction of new departments.
Analyze the path of the company
When thinking about planning and strategizing, it’s critical to view pre-execution steps with the same importance as the implementation phase. As the saying goes, “if your fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
In other words, you need to consider where your company is going.
In the beginning, you may have just wanted to stay afloat, but taking that next step requires you to set a course. You need to sit down and contemplate, whether by yourself or with your core staff, to determine your overall business goals.
It’s also important to know where you are right now. Let’s call it your ‘Point A.’ This serves as the starting point from where you can move forward your business goals. In the same way as knowing your end goal is essential, you also need to know where you are coming from in order to reach your Point B, Point C, and so forth.
During your planning session, realize your current situation and check for alignment with your company’s original mission and vision. As you strategize on which department needs to be established, you’ll develop a better understanding of all the requirements that need to be addressed.
You also need to understand how your company appears from an outside perspective. This can be done by getting feedback from clients, from taking a look at your online reputation through Google search and evaluating your online presence, and through evaluation by your employees.
When you see how the company is viewed in every way, you can now decide what departments are necessary to be created.
Plan how to execute the introduction of new departments
Once you decide which department or departments to create, it’s time to get the ball rolling. This is where you need to execute what you have envisioned and start implementing guidelines for the new structure of your overall business system.
This is where it’s important to ask key questions. You have to decide who will run this department, whether you need a larger staff, and how this all fits into existing infrastructure.
For example, say you want to expand your sales department. Up to this point, you have been exceeding your expectations in terms of sales per month. Things snowball and there are more opportunities than you can reasonably handle with the existing structure.
If you’re hiring new people, you need to decide whether you’re going to post jobs online and where. You can try the large job post aggregators like Indeed or Monster, or you can rely on local sites. For example, if you’re in New York, it might be a good idea to post on a site that caters specifically to jobs in New York. You can also lean on employee referrals or take a look to social media sites like Linkedin for recruitment.
Also, establishing departments in the company could happen one department at a time or multiple departments all at once.
The former allows an option to test out the growth and follow through accordingly. The latter takes on more duties all at the same time, which is what happens when a business expands rapidly.
Regardless, the infrastructure needs to be there. You need to know who is handling what. For this, it’s best to put one qualified person in charge of the department and allow them to grow it as needed.
This person can report directly to the business owner, and can be held accountable for deciding what is and isn’t needed at any time. This process can usually happen slowly.
But sometimes you don’t have the choice to move slowly. If things aren’t coming together immediately, that is okay. It may take time for everything to fall into place.
Constantly review the progression
A new system needs guidance.
In order for you to make sure that the departments are in line with the company mission and vision, you need to establish a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for every department.
This allows you to see if one department is working effectively or not. It is like a grading system for the business. If one fails, you need to see why it failed and then do corrective actions. If it passes, you recognize the workers and see that they continue producing.
It’s also important to make sure your staff is staying aligned with the duties as they were laid out. At first, it may be difficult to them because everything might seem new or different. However, if everyone cooperates and works according to the set guidelines, things should run smoothly.
It’s important to empower whoever you have running a new department. Ask if they have other ideas on how to help the company succeed.
You can also ask your clients or customers if they have been experiencing more effective service with the way things are now. This feedback allows you to grow more and learn more as things continue to grow for your company.
