By: Jason Toshack, Vice President and General Manager ANZ at Oracle NetSuite
Entrepreneurs appear to be optimistic about starting a new business, with an uptick in new businesses created in Australia last year. But with only with 65% of businesses surviving past five years in Australia, what strategies can entrepreneurs adopt to succeed when growing, scaling, and adapting their business? Here are some tried and true practices that successful entrepreneurs have embraced.
Growing your business
Frost & Sullivan found that 39% of successful Australian entrepreneurs attribute their success to detailed business planning and strong processes and procedures enabled by their IT systems. Entrepreneurs can start on the right foot when growing their business by investing in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This will help to build a process to track sales pipelines and identify opportunities for customer growth.
Establish efficient financial processes to ensure invoices are paid on time – poor cash flow was the number two reason for business failure across JAPAC, according to Frost & Sullivan. Monitor your supply chain. As we have seen from the past year, businesses with an accurate, real-time view of their supply chain – and who can adapt logistics as needed – fare well.
Finally, the importance of building a captivating omnichannel customer experience cannot be understated. As you attract more customers, the ways in which they prefer to purchase your goods, transact, and generally interact with your business, will increase. For example, some may want to buy online or have the option to ‘click and collect’ their order. Tracking customer satisfaction and adapting to suit the needs of the customer is key. In fact, more than half of the entrepreneurs Frost & Sullivan surveyed (mentioned above) used customer satisfaction to measure their business’ success. This can help you cater your offering to what your customers want, increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Achieving scale
Complexity is the enemy of scale. It hampers productivity and frustrates teams who could be spending their time on more valuable activities. As business leaders look to build upon what they have achieved and scale operations, taking a holistic view of the business is crucial.
Start by investigating your business data to find any red flags in timesheet data, internal surveys, or customer feedback. Use these findings to build a list of areas for improvement. Next, analyse the existing capabilities of your business tools to see where there are gaps in functionality that are slowing things down. For example, if customers are frequently complaining about receiving their goods too slowly, is it an issue somewhere in your supply chain and delivery network, or could the problem be that your team cannot process orders quickly enough?
This naturally leads to the next consideration – visibility. If leaders and employees don’t have access to data that supports informed decision making – or if it takes too long to access such data – people will default to ‘gut-led’ decision making. This may have sufficed when operations were relatively small and customers were few, but it won’t be sustainable as a business scale.
Adapting to sustain growth
Leaders of businesses that have stood the test of time understand the importance of adaptability.
Such adaptability has been key to success. The same Frost & Sullivan research found over one-third of entrepreneurs across JAPAC said ‘having a flexible business model’ was the most important lesson they learned as a business owner due to Covid-19. So how can leaders of more mature businesses ensure they thrive, not just survive? Here are two areas to consider:
- Seize new opportunities – with time can come complacency. Technology is a great enabler to help identify and take advantage of new opportunities without limit. For example, does your current technology support add-ons through additional modules that plug right into your system? Such modules can support growth by making it easy to set up a new ecommerce store or provide multi-currency options to sell in new markets. If your business tools cannot support your aspirations, it’s time to re-evaluate your technology needs
- Reduce costs – as businesses reach maturity, costs incurred through inefficient operations can quickly erode the bottom line. Dive into your business data to uncover inefficiencies that may exist in operations, the supply chain, financial reconciliation and more. Scrutinise ‘old’ ways of doing things and look for ways to streamline processes. For example, are there menial tasks that could be automated, or is there a way to improve margins by opening a direct-to-consumer channel? Leave no stone unturned as you look for ways to do things more efficiently
Every phase of business presents its own challenges and opportunities. I know that this is by no means an exhaustive list of everything to consider during your business journey, but this reflects my discussions and observations, having worked with many successful entrepreneurs over the years.
