Is Your Inventory-Driven Business Experiencing Growing Success?

The Business with a Growth Spurt

You probably feel the wind in the sails of the business ship you have launched. Simply put: There’s progress in your inventory-driven webshop, store, wholesale or production company.

Increasingly, the compass of customers has started to point in your direction when they are looking for a solution to their needs.

Your warehouse has started to fill up nicely, and the flow of orders is picking up speed. Perhaps, your company has even seen the arrival of more employees recently.

Whether it is due to Google, an excellent product, good marketing, hardworking employees, or a combination, is essentially irrelevant (for this particular blog).

The important thing is that the present looks bright for you and your company.

But you may still be thinking: “How can I be absolutely sure that I am on the right track?” This is a reasonable thing to ponder since it can be difficult to spot pitfalls and work processes that need to be tweaked as you feel the business is booming.

Or maybe you would like to pick up some tips and tricks on how to take it to the next level and become an established player in your industry.

Regardless, stay tuned so you can continue your growth journey!

But first, what actually characterizes the growing success of an inventory-driven company?

How Do You Know If Your Business is Growing?

You’re starting to feel that your business plan is gaining momentum. Core segments have increasingly taken notice of your product. Revenue is increasing. But what else characterizes a growing business?

1. The owner or manager is still very hands-on but has gradually started hiring more employees and maybe even department heads to handle various aspects of the business.
2. You’re in the middle of establishing standardized workflows with best practices. However, there is not yet a unified understanding of the work processes across the organization.
3. Perhaps you have found a few digital solutions for certain functions. Yet, these solutions don’t communicate as they are not integrated. Therefore, you don’t really have a complete overview of the key metrics, and your forecasts are not crystal clear yet.
4. You’re starting to build long-lasting customer relationships, developing the framework for partner programs and trying to optimize employee satisfaction.

At this stage, many business owners feel quite comfortable. Therefore, they have no concrete plans to expand in the foreseeable future.

Others have gasoline in their veins and prefer to continue speeding down the highway towards greater growth.

Both options can be the right thing to do. It all depends on the market and, of course, the individual company. Do you have the capital, investors, manpower, product, sufficient market share, etc., to take the next step?

Regardless, there are some specific things you can do to fine-tune the workflows of your business, so your company will be ready for the next stop on the growth journey.

How to Increase Your Success and Move on to the Next Stage of Your Growth Adventure

One thing that helps all businesses grow is increased data systematization.

Therefore, try to collect reports on orders, inventory, etc., more automatically. Many companies start investing in a CRM or an accounting system to make this much easier and more efficient.

The days of using Excel, Google Sheets, Word or your handwriting should ideally come to an end if you want to elevate your business to the Premier League. These manual tools will eventually present you with some heavy problems.

For example, it’s difficult to avoid typos. Even if you and your employees are skilled and highly focused, it’s nearly impossible not to make mistakes when the pace is high. A study shows that when you track inventory movements, accounting and invoicing manually, there is a looming risk of errors. In fact, there is approximately 1 mistake for every 300 characters you input.

And that will definitely have a negative impact on your inventory value and the bottom line in general.

(* A product overview from Rackbeat that provides automatic updates on product movements and the inventory status.)

In addition to this frustrating aspect, there are other reasons why your business shouldn’t rely on Excel or similar systems if you want to ride the wave of success.

To name a few, these programs are not great at visualizing data, they are not well-suited for multiple employees working on the same document, and as the files grow larger, they become cumbersome for the computer to load.

Furthermore, you constantly have to base your decisions on data that isn’t fully up to date since you have to do the work yourself before it is updated. And then the status of your purchases, orders and inventory value have already changed. That doesn’t exactly help you on the path to more success.

In addition to looking for alternatives to manually demanding tools, you can also do other things to optimize order handling and inventory management.

For example, you can create picking lists, shelf lists and establish some form of location management so that order fulfillments can run more automatically – and thus faster. This will create even better customer experiences, and you will be able to handle a lot more orders (and thereby sell more).

But what is the alternative to running your inventory-driven business through spreadsheets?

Optimize Your Inventory Management with a Cloud-Based Inventory System

If you would like to learn more about what a cloud-based inventory management system can do for your business that Excel or similar spreadsheets are not capable of, you can benefit from reading our blog post “Why Your Inventory-Driven Business Should Drop Excel” or take a look at what Rackbeats inventory management system has to offer right here.

Otherwise, you can continue your growth journey and read blog 3 here in the series “Is Your Business Ready to Grow?,” titled “Is Your Warehouse-Driven Business Mature Yet?”