The timing is perfect for starting your own business, and the climate ideal for running a small company, as they make up the majority of the global business scene. However, building a service or product that is needed on the market, and finding a brilliant way to deliver it to the world is not enough to make your business grow.

All your expertise aside, you’ll also need to sharpen your management skills to put all your business potential to maximum use. You'll need to create business processes to manage your finances, time, inventory, risk, cash flow, and people. And not all us were born leaders – most learn while doing.

As you begin your business journey, you can work to improve your leadership skills with the help of the following management tips. Although no business is the same, and you cannot rely on a cookie-cutter learning process, you can incorporate the following management essentials and then build upon those skills of yours that require the most improvement!

How to Manage a Small Business Successfully After Startup

Here are five ways to keep your company growing as you sharpen your business management skills.

Make it official

Even lone-wolves of the business community will benefit from registering their business because you’ll avoid a whole slew of potential legal and operational issues from day one. Setting up an LLC is one of the most frequently chosen ways to build your business, but you can go for a different legal entity if that will work better for your needs.

What matters is that you should keep your personal finances and possessions out of your business game, so even if something goes awry with your company, no one will be able to touch your personal assets. Not to mention that registering your company helps build your reputation as a trustworthy organization.

Keep learning

Most business owners have their schedules booked to the brim, so to speak, but if you leave absolutely no room for self-improvement, you’ll see your business slip every now and then. It’s essential for new business owners to invest in their own continuing education. For example, if your “weak link” is website maintenance, you can easily find even free online courses that will teach you the basics of updating your pages, posting blogs, and the like.

Even if you have mastered the essentials, there is always a new marketing approach to try, or some clever app to put to use. With just a bit of extra knowledge on your hands, through education as well as practice, you’ll help your company grow.

Automate your processes as much as possible

If you are, for example, an expert in fashion and want to start your own online store, chances are you won’t be able to work on every single aspect of the business. There’s so much to think about, from inventory, delivery times, keeping track of invoices, and other complex processes which you cannot afford to mishandle.

The sooner you find a reliable automation solution, such as SAP Business One, to take care of those most sensitive aspects of your business, the easier it will be for your company to advance. A powerful enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is a must for companies that may start small but have the ambition to grow and make their customers happy. Plus, when you automate these business processes, you can devote more of your time to hands-on tasks and more pressing matters.

Educate your employees

Educating yourself is not enough for your business to find its way to the top. On the contrary, it takes a team of dedicated individuals who are still happy to learn even though they qualify for their current position.
More often than not, modern-day employees actually crave learning opportunities, whether it’s through more challenging assignments or actual training and seminars.

You can make it a company-wide effort and have a brainstorming session with your employees, to see what they would like in terms of learning and improvement. A dozen heads are far better than a single one at finding the best options for your company, so let them share their views!

Delegate wisely 

In addition to automation and good old team-work, you also need to be able to assign the right amount of work to the right people. The general rule of thumb is that 80% of your business success is the result of only 20% of your efforts, which means that you should devote more of your energy and time to those few, but crucial success-building steps.

Micro-managing, taking every single call and meeting, and not relying on your employees when you can and should, may lead to burnout that will cost your company a few steps forward. Instead, make sure that your team is working to their full capacity, so that you, in your role as a manager, can ensure success on a more vital level.

Our guest author Emma Worden is a business manager from Sydney.

She enjoys reading and writing about business topics, as well as offering advice and tips through her articles.

If you want to read more of her work, you can find it at Bizzmark Blog.