Looking at when startups might want to think about expanding and what steps they can take when they reach this point
Is Your Recruitment Startup Ready To Expand?
You’re a startup and you’ve been successfully growing your business with care and attention, passion and drive. Has the time now come for your startup to expand, and how do you know if you have reached this point? You don’t want to peak too soon, hire more staff before you’re ready or start taking on work you don’t have the capacity for yet, but you don’t want to be missing out on bigger business if you are ready to take it on.
Don’t push your startup recruitment agency to expand, if it is working perfectly as it is, that’s great! The aim of every business, of course, is to develop and improve but if that doesn’t necessarily mean developing and growing right now, then expansion won’t be your focus at the moment and managing your natural growth or steady stream of work should be your priority, not worrying about ‘should I be expanding?’.
What should you be considering when you’re eager to expand?
If success and improvement does include business expansion, then timing is definitely one thing you need to be very aware of and in tune with.
Likely the clues that your recruitment startup is ready to grow, will come naturally without looking for them, for example, business that you’re having to turn down as you don’t quite have the capacity. If this becomes a relatively frequent occurrence, you have the demand. Your business is drawing in more business than you can handle so your expansion can be justified by your need to meet the demand.
Now you feel that the demand for your services justifies your need to expand, do not become complacent in the knowledge that business is lining up at your door. This business needs to continue and if you’ve had to turn business down, those potential clients may have written you off as an option. Continue and increase your efforts to attract clients, and return to any leads that you have either previously turned away or haven’t followed up on recently.
An important note here is that you already have clients, your current business is important. They have not asked you to expand and they should not feel the effects of this, when pondering the following pointers, consider this: your current client’s services should not be compromised when establishing staffing changes or any other changes you might decide upon.
You could start by thinking about your physical assets such as your staff, do you have part-time staff who could become full time? Perhaps your small team is willing and eager, as you are, to expand and will work longer hours to accommodate extra work, or bonuses or pay negotiations could be considered for taking on more work. Do you need to recruit any additional staff to accommodate the additional work you are bringing on board? Are these extra staff going to ultimately mean a larger premises is required?
Don’t forget your costings.
All of these additions are going to cost. If the additional work is not going to be worth the additional costs then perhaps this isn’t quite the time for business expansion, or perhaps you know you’ll need and are willing to take a small loss so that you can truly begin to scale the business.
Don’t forget to analyse.
Why? We all know it’s important to monitor and compare performance in business with the view to improve; change what’s not working and replicate what is.
Be conscious of doing this before and during your recruitment agency expansion, you need to be able to compare where you were before, how your practices have changed, for the better or worse, so you can roll out those that are really working for you. Analytics are so important, especially when you’re making big changes to the business, and you may well find out things you never realised about your own business, perhaps you’ll discover you have an accidental niche!
Belief.
You have to maintain the courage and the belief that your agency is ready for business expansion. Try not to get lost during the whole exciting, frightening endeavour, don’t lose your vision or your confidence that you can do this!
