Small Business Management: Understanding Which Department to Expand Next

Business  

So, your small business is growing, and it looks like you’ll need to hire more employees to handle its expansion. This is an exciting time for your business, but it can also be somewhat tricky to know which department you should expand.

Follow these steps to decide which department is the right choice for expansion.

1. Assess Your Current Setup

Adding one or more employees to your small business is a big change. Before you do anything drastic, you should evaluate the current setup at your small business, paying careful attention to any issues that you find. It may turn out that you have some employees who aren’t in optimal roles for their skillsets, in which case your business would benefit from adjusting what those employees are doing. It doesn’t make sense to hire someone to handle your marketing if you already have an employee who could do that if he weren’t stuck on your sales team.

You could have one team that is bloated with too many people, while another team needs some additional help. Look for changes you could make within your company before hiring people.

It’s also important to consider what you hope to gain by hiring new employees. Make sure you have a plan for how they can make your workflow more efficient.

2. Look at Individual Department Needs

Now, it’s time to take a deeper look at which departments are currently in need of assistance. Does your sales team not have enough people to handle the number of customers that come in on a daily basis? Or is your marketing department struggling to produce enough online ads?

Start by seeing if any teams don’t have enough members right now. If so, that is your first priority. If every team is doing fine, think about your future needs. Will you need a larger marketing team as your business expands into a new market? Or do you think that increasing sales numbers will soon leave you in need of more customer service representatives to handle customer issues? Being able to predict what your business is going to need keeps you ahead of the curve.

3. Finding Your Next Employees

It’s not enough to know where you need people. Your business also needs to have an effective hiring process in place, so you can find quality employees who will improve your business.

Establish hiring protocols that you can follow with every candidate. Not only does this simplify your hiring process, but it also makes it easier for you to compare candidates, since you’ll be using the same protocols for all of them.

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Finding suitable candidates isn’t easy. You can post ads for open positions, but you’re likely to receive quite a few applicants that you’ll then have to spend your time sorting through. Another option is recruiting candidates, but this also takes valuable time that could be spent on higher-priority tasks. You may want to consider recruitment process outsourcing, where you have another company handle the recruitment phase for you. Your business saves time, and the candidates you end up with will be pre-screened to ensure that they’re a good fit for what your business needs

Final Thoughts

Sometimes the process of determining which department to expand is cut and dry. If there’s one team that clearly needs one or more members to handle its workload, then you know that you need to start there. It’s not so simple when you have multiple teams that could use help, or when all your teams have enough people and you need to predict future needs. Use your best judgement in deciding which team could use assistance the most. If you’re hiring to handle future workloads, don’t be afraid to take some time so you can ensure that you’re making the right decision.

By  Mark Palmer	Embed
Author Bio - Mark Palmer is a small business expert and has a passion for helping entrepreneurs make the most out of their company. As a freelance writer, Mark hopes to influence others so they can have a positive business experience.