5 Steps To Become an Expert To Grow Your Small Business

Ivan Epstein, Softline co-founder and Sage AAMEA CEO, offers five fundamental principles to help you grow your small business in 2024

Step 1. Get your admin sorted

 Most small business owners dislike doing admin because it distracts them from selling, serving customers, and growing the business. However, it is essential to be on top of your paperwork to meet the demands of SARS, the Department of Labour, and other government bodies and to ensure that your cash flow stays healthy.

The right software will help to take some of the pain out of paperwork by automating it for you. An accounting application can streamline many calculations and forecasts you need to do to stay on top of your business.

Step 2. Take risk management seriously

 White-collar crime is on the rise in South Africa, which means you need to take steps to protect your business. In addition to credit card fraud and other scams, you might encounter people outside your company. Be alert to the rising incidence of payroll fraud. It happens mostly to businesses with fewer than 100 employees and can seriously hurt their ongoing sustainability.

However, there are a few simple steps you can take to protect your business against payroll fraud. These include enforcing the segregation of duties and investing in a robust automated payroll solution to capture and track transactions. Use the information from your payroll system to keep tabs on payroll transactions and impose checks and balances on the payroll environment.

Step 3. Investigate the cloud

 

If you’re still relying on Excel spreadsheets or an old accounting package to manage your accounting and payroll, now might be the right time to consider new technologies such as cloud applications. As a cloud user, your accounting application and data are accessible through your browser no matter where you are—accounting and payroll are as simple as using Facebook or Gmail.
The data is hosted at a secure data center, so you don’t need to worry about security, infrastructure, or technical skills – instead, you can concentrate on running your business. Plus, the cloud changes everything by allowing you to work anywhere and whenever you have an Internet connection.

Step 4. Make time for your employees

 

Your employees are critical to your business’s growth, so investing in them is essential. The happier and the better trained they are, the more innovative and customer-centered they will be. Consider investing in employee self-service tools that will help you to automate routine HR processes such as leave applications. This will free you up to spend more time training, developing, and mentoring your team.

Step 5. Be creative about your marketing

 

You’re running a successful and profitable business, so why not take it to the next level by marketing your products and services to a bigger audience? Sure, advertising and public relations can be expensive, but you can also do basic search engine optimization and use social media to get your brand out. Other avenues to raise awareness of your business are, for example, competitions for small businesses, such as the annual 702/Cape Talk Small Business Awards. These awards can be an excellent way to get marketing traction without spending a significant amount of money – they usually attract a lot of attention in the media.