What Does It Mean to Build a Sustainable Business?
Discover the essence of building a sustainable business with guidance from Tekie Geek. Elevate your operations for lasting success.
Three main characteristics of a sustainable organization are:
· CONTINUITY or the ability to repeat processes
· AVAILABILITY or the ability to adapt to sudden changes
· SCALABILITY or the ability to scale up or down as needed
Although some businesses can grow exponentially over a short period of time, if they don't have repeatable processes to support things like new hires and onboarding, everything falls apart. These processes must also be adaptable enough to change as needed to meet organizational requirements. Businesses also need to be able to scale or grow/reduce resources on demand.
As a business leader, you should prioritize sustainable scaling over rapid, unsustainable growth because rapid shifts aimed at addressing a current problem without due diligence can backfire later and become a blot on your organization's growth story.
What fuels a sustainable business?
Never miss these if you aim to grow sustainably:
Platform for growth
All your business solutions should connect to a central hub and act as a platform for growth to improve productivity and efficiency. Instead of focusing on the features and functionality of each solution itself, think about the capabilities of the combined solutions altogether.
Updated documentation
A simple and powerful automated documentation system can instantly help your employees work more effectively. It allows your employees to modify or revise existing templates in the document generation system to be able to comply with changing regulations. This helps manage and create business documents on time with greater accuracy and efficiency.
Learning management
An integrated learning management system can help you customize and manage employee training across teams and accelerate employee engagement. Remember, the more knowledgeable your employees are and the longer they stay, the better they are able to serve your customers. So, never be afraid to invest in employee security awareness training because it certainly yields a high return on investment. Preventing even a single phishing attempt can save your company thousands right off the bat!
Integration
Because they consolidate data, solutions that successfully integrate with each other can be a long-term asset for your organization. However, some executives overlook this, resulting in a mishmash of incompatible technologies and a team of confused and frustrated employees. Lack of integration can be a real pain in the neck in the long run and could be the biggest hurdle on the road to your organization’s sustainable growth.
Automation
Automating time-wasting and repetitive manual processes lowers costs, improves efficiency, reduces errors, and boosts customer and employee satisfaction all at the same time. Make sure you don't get left behind in a time where the more proactive businesses have already automated their systems to achieve sustainable growth.
Partner for success
If you fail at being a sustainable business, you risk losing your employees and customers alike. Employees are not stupid these days. They understand that the best companies to work for are the ones who invest in their employees and their overall growth, not in just their bottom line. It’s time to abandon rapid unplanned acceleration in favor of sustainable and profitable growth that can help you achieve both customer & employee satisfaction and long-term success at once!
A managed service provider (MSP) like Tekie Geek can help you achieve sustainable scalability more seamlessly than on your own or with a different IT provider. Feel free to contact us for a no-obligation consultation to learn ways to make your company more sustainable together!
