What is the Speed of Business?

“You’re either growing or your dying, there ain’t no third direction,” is often said about business. It has been my experience, though, that there is a third direction- staying the same. Many small businesses make roughly the same amount in revenue that they did the year before. It may be growing a little or shrinking a little- perhaps barely outpacing inflation. Some small businesses grow, but at a slow enough rate that they appear to be basically the same business they were five or ten years ago. Why does it take so long to grow a business?

Wil Shroter on the Go Big Network wrote a blog post about compressing time in business. He claims that when venture capital came along, it drastically shrunk the amount of time it took to go from a start-up to a billion dollar company. With a large influx of cash to a great idea and plan, things happen on a much smaller time scale. He further explains that even without venture capital, businesses have found multiple ways of compressing time and growing faster.

Two Great Examples

In the post, Schroter talks about Ebay and Google, who used a process of acquiring millions of free customers in order to get thousands of paying ones. By giving away their services to the masses, they were able to acquire tons of customers in an extremely short period of time.

OK. Reality check. Most of us aren’t trying to start the next great internet business. Many of us simply offer services or products to a local market. How can businesses like ours shrink the timeline? The best way to speed things up is to create an efficient sales cycle. Work on shrinking the time it takes from meeting a potential customer to actually completing a paid job. Volumes have been written on how to sell, or you could hire a professional salesperson or consultant to help you develop a better process. Or, as Schroter suggests, you could work on picking up work that other companies similar to yours are trying to outsource, eliminating a part of your selling process altogether.

Another way to compress your timeline is to get paid faster. That means implementing a start-to-finish collections process. You are not bugging clients for money, you are just keeping your invoices at the top of the pile and preventing any of your stuff from slipping through the cracks.

The idea is to work with whatever you have and improve your processes. Don’t simply continue do things a certain way simply because you have always done it that way. Improve your skills and the skills of your team. You may be positioned for a lot faster growth than you think.