Building a successful business is one thing; growing it from an already successful base takes fresh eyes and a willingness to change your business model along the way.
Look at everything with fresh eyes
Ian Fuhr, Sorbet
“My entrepreneurial journey has been rich and varied. Each time I enter a new industry, I try to look at it with fresh eyes. I bring the lessons from where I’ve come, and sometimes that perspective is very useful, like my approach to Sorbet via a retail model. This is as important when you’re growing. Don’t be contaminated by conventional wisdom of the industry you operate within. Just because something has always been done in a certain way, doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way of doing it.”
Evaluate where you should be spending money
Colin Thornton, Dial a Nerd
“It’s easy to get caught up in your own success, and incur unnecessary expenses as a result. When we closed our flagship store on William Nicol Drive and moved into a basement space in Bryanston, no one noticed. We were suddenly saving tens of thousands on rent, and our clients had never visited our premises anyway. We then started critically evaluating all our expenditure. A mobile workforce, two consolidated admin offices and closing our retail branches made significant savings on our bottom line and radically improved our profit margins, and instead of clients noticing a drop in services levels, the opposite happened: We were leaner and more structured and focused than ever.”
Get on the journey
Ryan Bacher, NetFlorist
“This piece of advice was given to me by a major retailer at an Entrepreneur’s Organisation event. He told us that if you want to change something in your business, take bite-sized chunks and get on the journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. If you can’t measure you can’t manage, so choose just one thing, and start there. It can be daunting. A few years ago I realised we weren’t measuring things in our own business, and so we started with one thing: Fuel consumption. Once you have interesting data that you can work with, measure the next thing. Slowly you’ll build up the data you need. Businesses need to evolve. This can be daunting, but as long as you’re on the journey, those valuable changes will happen.”
