For a business to grow stress-free, the key word you need to keep in mind at all time is ‘anticipation’. Indeed, as many business tools will seem useless during the first steps of your company, it is when you will actually need them that you will already be overwhelmed with work and have not much free time to integrate them in your processes. Let’s take the example of business tools to illustrate this.
Online survey tools and services
Online survey tools are very useful when it comes to get customer feedback. Of course, when you launch your business, you don’t have many clients and you have the time to chat with them to understand their needs and expectations clearly. But with time, you’ll have more and more customers and it will become very difficult to take enough time with each one of them to provide them with the right goods or services.
When you come to this point, you will probably already lack time to integrate a new tool in your company. Getting used to it and even maybe training an employee to use it correctly is much time-consuming. The same goes if you outsource online survey services (click here to see an example). You’ll need to take time to get to know the company and their services and define your needs clearly.
Internal communication tools
An internal communication tool is a ‘must have’ when you start to hire employees. Of course, you won’t need it before you have at least two employees, and it will probably seem useless until you have at least ten, but let’s take it this way: integrating an internal communication tool when you have ten employees can be tricky. You’ll need to train them to use it and you will probably have to face many mistakes at the beginning, all at once.
As if you take the tool from your first or second employee, you’ll have to train only one or two people and won’t face too many mistakes. These two employees will then be able to train their next colleagues gradually, avoiding you to face an important transition phase. Things will go smoothly and you will be able to carry on focusing on your growth. A good example of a tool of this kind is Slack.
Social media management tools
If you want your business to grow fast, the one thing you want is to be seen everywhere, at any time, and by as many people as possible. The key to this purpose? Social media, obviously. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook… Everyone uses at least one of them on a daily basis, if not all of them.
During the first steps of your activity, you’ll publish maybe a couple of posts per day on each. That seems alright. But imagine now that your business grow much faster than what you expected – which we wish you of course ! – and that tomorrow you launch a new branch. You’ll then need new accounts for this branch, and more posts every day.
At this point, again, you’ll probably be overwhelmed by work and won’t have time to get used to a new tool. That’s why we highly recommand you start using a social media management tool from the very beginning. If you don’t know any, you may have a look at Buffer.
To sum up, if you want your business to grow fast and smooth, always remember to anticipate your needs and start using tools before you actually need them.