When your business is small, you'll have the time to do everything single-handedly with your team. But as your business grows, it begins to feel like there isn't enough time in the day to accomplish everyday administrative tasks and focus on productive work. That's when you need help - both technical and financial.
So what are some of the business expansion goals you can focus on, and how can you finance them? That's the point of this article. We'll outline six business expansion goals you can achieve by embracing business intelligence tools and working capital to help you finance your goals.
1. Investing in tech tools for project growth
It's risky trying to expand your business without knowing where you're going. Earlier, businesses used to invest time to collect and analyze data to forecast demand and growth potential manually. The process was expensive, painstakingly slow, and rife with human error. That was true until AI gave us business intelligence (BI) tools.
You no longer need to comb through spreadsheets to analyze data and generate reports. Leave that tedious work to software and focus on acting on real-time reports generated automatically. BI software systems collect and analyze both planned and actual business data on the go and use it to generate detailed reports to give you real-time insights on product/service demand and growth potential.
Thus, you can make informed business decisions, uncover business trends, and plan your business growth with minimal risk. You get an accurate picture of your business's future success, and how planned expansion may affect your business revenue.
It will take money to build and integrate such tech into your existing business infrastructure. But the benefits are so huge that such expenses end up paying for themselves. And the good thing is, the upfront cost can easily be met with a working capital loan.
2. Automating administrative work
Administrative overheads are the biggest time sucker for businesses everywhere. While important, juggling administrative tasks manually can hinder your business expansion. For service-based companies, these are tasks like project planning and scheduling, cost estimation, resource allocation, and managing changes into a project plan.
If you have many projects going, managing such tasks through spreadsheets and pen-and-paper manual systems is not only a pain in the neck but can derail the quality of your business projects and hinder growth.
Savvy entrepreneurs fuel their expansion plans by investing in AI and business intelligence to automate administrative tasks. Tools like Auto-Schedule use AI to learn about your team's skills and competencies to automatically estimate tasks, assign and optimize resources and set deadlines for each team member. Thus, you’ve enough time left to focus on the real project work and progress, rather than the repetitive tasks of assigning tasks and allocating resources.
3. Setting workflow automation
Imagine your team members sitting idly waiting for project updates because someone isn't around to brief them! That results in delayed delivery of business projects and poor productivity. Lack of clear communication and collaboration among team members can hinder your business expansion. That's why workflow automation should be a top expansion goal in your business.
Investing in collaboration software helps improve team productivity and timely delivery of projects. Team members can share files, comments, and get everything related to the specific task each team or department is working on in one place. Everyone is kept in the loop with a list of tasks to work on and the priority of each task. Plus, you can remotely track the progress of each project and suggest points of improvement early enough to fast-track delivery.
The net effect is complete transparency across teams, fast-paced project delivery, increased team productivity, happier clients, and more business growth.
4. Embrace financial reporting tools
Lack of financial transparency is a bane for businesses of all sizes. That's a common scenario when trying to project and monitor profits and business expenditure manually. If you're working on several business projects, things can go awry in a big way. By all means, you need to nail your budget numbers.
That's where budget management and financial reporting tools come in. They use your sales or project data to generate project budgets, monitor costs, project business revenues, and profits. You'll be able to see clearly where money is coming from or going to in your business. With a holistic view of your business revenue, you can make informed decisions on growth areas to pursue, and where you should cut or put more money to drive performance.
Financial reporting tools also help you see your accounts payable and receivable so that at any given time, you know the financial standing of your company. Again, they integrate with your accounting software and automatically generate invoices using project data or supplier data. This makes for faster billing.
Such financial transparency comes in handy when you want to obtain a working capital loan to fund business projects and expand. Before you go looking for a lender, you can disassemble the numbers and use up-to-the-minute reports to determine the amount you need.
5. Move operations to the cloud
Building the software tools you need to expand your business and keep it running smoothly from scratch is quite expensive. It means keeping a software team in-house or hiring programmers to build an AI-enabled software system, which is an addition to your existing business projects. You don't have to go to that root. Luckily, cloud-based platforms like Forecast offer all the business expansion tools in one place.
From business intelligence and team collaboration to AI work automation and project management tools, Forecast has all the modern tech you need to streamline operations and grow your business. The only expense you need to worry about is the upfront cost of integrating your existing business systems to the Forecast platform.
The good thing is, you can quickly obtain a working capital loan from an online lender to meet those costs. It leads us to the last point below.
6. Partner with the right fintech lenders
Knowing where to access growth capital quickly is part and parcel of your expansion goals. It can be hard to obtain traditional loans if you don't have a solid credit score, trading history, and substantial business revenues. You’ll also face a bureaucratic, paper-laden application process and lengthy approval periods of weeks to months when obtaining financing from banks.
Depending on your goals, the easiest way to finance your business expansion is to work with a reputable fintech lender like Camino Financial. They offer working capital loans and other types of small business financing to keep your business growing. The application process is simple, and once you qualify, money will be in your account in 1-2 business days.
