Growing a Local Service Business depends on Headcount (NID48)

Solopreneur Phrase of Grow Local Business

A business dependent on the Founder’s skill typically starts with just the Founder acting as a solo entrepreneur.

To grow, they’ll need to take on the first staff member, which effectively means doubling the business’s wage cost, and therefore doubling the necessary revenue.  A very big and very risky step.

New Founders may be competent at their professional skill, but lack exposure to business skills like sales and marketing to raise that revenue.  They’re also flat out doing their day job to earn their own income while trying to start a business as well.

The LinkedIn founder famously said, “building a business is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down”.

These early stage problems – a rapid revenue increase and shortage of time –  probably explain why half –  that’s 50% of startups – don’t last a year. Imagine what this means in dashed hopes and lost time and lost money.

It really is survival of the fittest.

This first growth step is the first yawning chasm a Founder faces.

Our resources aim to shortcut your research time and get you off to a great start.

The Micro Business (1-4 Staff) stage of Grow Local Business

The next stage of business growth is growing from one (the solopreneur) to around one to four staff. This is commonly called a micro business.

Generating revenue for the bigger wage bill of up to four staff is still a big problem.  And the Founder is still doing most of the sales and general management, but now also has to also learn people management and leadership.

So a new set of skills and systems are required.

We provide guidance on these issues so you have a helping hand with your steep learning curve.

Small Business (5-19 staff) Stage of Grow Business

A typical stage three for a local service business is moving from micro – that is one to four staff – to small business, which is five to 19 staff.

By now, the business has got too big for the Founder to run everything themselves, so the business will start to need middle management who supervise day-to-day operations.

Also some functions like sales and marketing have become more sophisticated than a Founder may have time and experience to manage themselves. So the business starts to also hire specialist managers.

So now our intrepid Founder is managing people who manage people or who manage specific roles like sales and marketing.

This is yet another whole new set of skills and, once again, 12Faces has a collection of resources to help with this learning curve.

Summation of Resources for Growth Stages

The 12Faces Mission is your Sustainable Business Success.

We have assembled resources covering the issues Founders face at each evolutionary step in growing their business.

This speeds up and simplifies each incremental growth step.

It also helps to point out those potential problems that you “don’t know, you don’t know about“.  This will reduce your stress levels from all this uncertainty and that’s always a good outcome.

Please visit our website 12Faces.business for more information on any of these topics.

Thank you for your time.