Progressing through the stages of enterprise maturity can be exciting! A successful business seems to take on a life of its own, growing at a rate that sometimes seems impossible, especially at the beginning.

Business leaders of rapidly growing businesses should be proud of their companies. However, a wise business owner will experience some trepidation as his company expands, nearly, overnight.

Signs You’ve Created a Monster

If you’ve got your eyes open and are paying attention, you may notice some signs that you’ve created a monster -- a “Frankenstein,” if you will. Rapidly-growing businesses often experience many of the same symptoms, including:

• The feeling that your employees need to work just a little bit harder to keep up

• Employee dread of mundane tasks that take FOREVER

• An increase in mistakes that the system’s checks and balances process isn’t detecting

• Declining quality of products or services, often due to other tasks demanding the attention of employees

• Less time for customers, as mundane tasks are requiring attention

• Declining profits due to customer dissatisfaction

What started out as a beautiful process of getting things done has now turned into a burden. This wonderful business is taking over your life and the lives of your employees.

Your pride and joy corporation has become your very own “Frankenstein.” Instead of you controlling and directing it, it’s become a demanding, needy entity. Your business requires more time and attention from you to tend to “business” details. Operational clumsiness may be a pressing issue. Balancing the financials, tending to investor relations and logistics about production or distribution may be distracting you from the original purpose of your business. Of course, these details can’t be ignored. But, you’re losing track of the inspiring part of your business, getting lost in all of the other “stuff.” Take advantage of your momentum and do something before it’s too late.

Taming Frankenstein

Gaining control back over your business when it feels like it’s a spiraling mess is a big challenge, but completely possible. The best way to tame your Frankenstein is to invest in your processes and learn to work smarter, not harder. Sometimes, it takes reducing the amount of time required to complete a task. By developing a better system of keeping track of your sales, distribution addresses or other repetitive tasks can help you get back time to devote to other areas of your business that you may have been distracted from.

Learn to delegate, once these new systems are in place. It can be hard to let go when you know how essential some tasks are. But, when you’ve implemented efficient methods of completing the chore, delegating to another employee can allow you to focus on other areas of the business that nobody else can do.

Clear Simple Business specializes in helping businesses tame their Frankensteins. Check us out today and learn how we can help!