If there is one thing that the rise of ecommerce has led to, it is the ease of starting an ecommerce business with the absolute minimum of resources. Theoretically, it can even just be you at the outset, sourcing your own inventory (or creating it), handling fulfilment yourself, and setting up a domain and website with only an internet connection and a small initial investment. All of this has been made easier by ecommerce – but nothing else has.
After you have your business up and running, the usual challenges of business begin to manifest. Growing a business is certainly not any easier than it was in the past. For that, you still require a great inventory, effective marketing, top service, and a market niche to tap into.
However, handling everything yourself is an acceptable way to start, and you can even take your business some of the way to achieving the stability necessary for growth just by handling everything on your own. That state of affairs does not last forever though. Eventually, the time will come to hire people.
The Importance of Grasping Growth
Before a company can grow in this way though, it needs, above all, to have a stable cash flow. Cash flow experts fastFACTR note that a stable cash flow means being able to meet all your financial obligations when these need to be met. It is therefore more important than overall profits because it means always having the necessary revenue to hand.
Services such as invoice factoring and debt factoring are often employed by small businesses in order to stay afloat until a stable cash flow has been established.
You cannot begin to grow until cash flow has been sorted out. But an equally dangerous mistake is to miss the opportunity for growth when it comes along. You might think you can simply truck along at a steady level, but stagnation nearly always leads to disaster in the end.
This is because customer interest in your company will grow, and you will not be able to meet the demand. Eventually, this will lead to disappointed customers and the precise opposite of growth.
Who to Hire
So, grasping growth is vital, and it always takes the form of making new investments to expand your business. These investments can be outsourcing certain tasks to other companies, expanding in-house infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, hiring new people.
But who should you hire? Here follows some essential roles to delegate sooner rather than later:
Marketing Manager
As your business grows, the task of supplying customers with the products they order will take more and more of your time. Yet growth is only possible with marketing, so enlisting someone else to head this department is filling an essential role.
Supply Chain Manager
Sourcing your inventory properly is one of the most important tasks, as well as being one of the ways you can achieve a stable cash flow. As inventory grows and order volume increases, this also becomes increasingly an onerous task. Therefore, it becomes wise to delegate it.
Web Developer
As your company grows, you are going to need a wieldier and more attractive website too. Few business experts are also IT experts and improving the website might very quickly exceed the limits of your expertise. Then it is time to hire.
Bringing these three new individuals to fill these three new roles in your company is a terrific way to alleviate your workload and allow you to pursue growth more forthrightly. In fact, as a company grows, it soon becomes essential to delegate these tasks.