How to Deal With Forced Growth

If you have prepared properly, growth is something that is easy to manage. If your business is running properly, you will embrace growth as you have sound financial management practices in place and the cash cushion to sail through periods of cash
flow instability. Your business will know who to hire and how to ensure they succeed. You will have the tracking systems in place to detect issues before they turn into impactful problems. You will know how to adapt to an unexpected short term dip in your sales.

Reject or Accept Growth Opportunities

Now that we've addressed whether you are prepared to grow, let's address the long-term impact of rejecting good growth opportunities. This goes to the heart of the forced growth
dilemma.

When you reject work from your good clients you are holding open their door for your competition. You are personally introducing the very people you pray don't ever meet and do business. Every possible outcome works against you.

If your competition proves to be capable, you're going to end up in an ongoing pricing war from here on out. If your completion proves to be better, you lose the account. If your competition proves to be incapable, your client will be angry at you for being forced to use someone who couldn't perform. You are in a no-win situation when you reject work from your high margin clients.

That isn't to say you must accept growth. Sometimes the financial risk of running a large business is something that just doesn't sit well with owners. They start losing sleep. They focus all of their time and energy on the business at the expense of their family and their own personal health. If you aren't going to be comfortable owning a large business then turn down the growth opportunities. Without a doubt most of the happy, financially sound contractors I've known are small. Of course, if they were to cease being able to work due to a health problem they would most assuredly be financially ruined within a couple of years.  It would only take one significant business mistake to wipe out their many years of success. You see, there is risk with every path.

Why is Forced Growth Worth Talking About?

Turning down high margin clients is really not a good practice to follow. Accepting their work and failing to perform is an even worse practice to follow!

Forced growth is something that will knock on your door once you get your sales and operations systems humming. That's right. Once you fix your sales problem you are going to be forced to prepare every aspect of your business for growth.