Growth Barriers for Your Small Business

Small business owners all desire growth and profitability but often fall short. Pike13 has identified the most common barriers that may cause growth barriers for your small business.

1. Jack of all trades, master at none
2. Not having a unified vision
3. Old-school administration
4. Lackluster tracking & reporting

Jack of all trades, master at none

You can try to be all things, to all people – but this usually ends up pulling you in a million directions at once. Better to have a clear picture of what you’re offering, and the demographic you’re offering it to. This will empower you to focus on your core skills and services – and to create an image and brand presence that’s unique from other players in the same arena.

Not having a unified vision

So, you have a vision for where your business should be in six months, a year, or more but your staff are not on the same page. Communication is vital with clients and staff alike. Small businesses often undergo significant changes in short periods of time and the reasoning or forethought that went into those changes should be expressed in an efficient manner. For example, schedule adjustments, staff orientation sessions, news, and updates can all be managed by using the digital and mobile communications tools of a software solution like Pike13 to keep your stakeholders in the loop.

Old-school administration

A fundamental part of growing your business is being prepared and willing to allow it to grow. Prepared in the sense of having the tools and capacity to cope with that growth. Time-consuming administrative tasks will eat up even more productive hours, as your business grows and becomes more complex. Pen, paper, and a standard spreadsheet won’t cut it – even for smaller scale businesses, in today’s digital economy. But a software platform like Pike13 will enable you to manage your appointment-based business and scale-up to accommodate the workload as your business expands.

As your small business expands so will things like enrollment, renewals, cancellations, etc. Old-school administration often involves emails, private messages, phone calls, and forms, that will  leave you feeling swamped. With a client management software platform like ours at Pike13, together with its integrated mobile app, this burden can be shifted to automated processes (such as the auto-renewing of memberships), real-time communications, and push notifications. With robust software handling the heavy lifting of processing your communications, you can easily stay on top of the administration of bookings and memberships. Client management software can eliminate the hassle of late payments. Our software can even enable members to buy subscriptions through the mobile app and have the charge for it deducted automatically, allowing you to avoid those awkward payment conversations.

Lackluster tracking & reporting

Keeping track of subscriptions and cancellations are vital elements to your successful growth. After all, you can hardly expand and scale your business if you don’t know how many active members you have – or if you keep losing prospects because there’s no follow-up activity to convince them to join or stay. Again, client management software can provide tools to enable this. For example, the Pike13 Reporting tool ensures you can keep track of key membership numbers on a daily basis, such as new signups, upcoming expirations, and renewals.

Charting your business growth is the final piece of the puzzle. Here, the goal is to identify the key factors influencing the progress of your business. From here, you can take advantage of your client management software reporting tool to monitor, gain insight and act upon these metrics. By really honing in on your objectives, you can tailor your reporting to fit your unique business, ultimately saving you both time and money in the long run.