Growth of a business brings increased number of customers, products, employees and transactions. Operations, coordination and communication become complex. More decisions need to be taken and need to be taken fast. Responsibilities need to be fixed. Problems need solutions.
Production must be planned and schedules must be made. Quality must be maintained and enhanced. Efficiency must be improved. Machines must be maintained and repaired.
Customers must be found, added, satisfied, delighted and retained. They must be supported. Their changing preferences and tastes must be tracked and attended to.
New products mist be developed regularly. Marketing must be planned, designed, executed and its results measured. Sales must be increased, targets must be set and achieved. Brands must be built and managed. Brand equity must be enhanced.
Employees must be recruited, selected, trained, managed, engaged, paid, motivated, evaluated and retained.
Accounts must be maintained, compliance ensured, taxes must be paid, audits must be carried out and balances must be tallied.
Finances must be managed, payables must be paid and receivables must be collected in time. Risk must be controlled and managed. Legalities must be taken care of. Information systems must be deployed and managed.
Inventories must be managed. Procurement must be done at optimum rates.
All these tasks are specific to some functions in the business. Initially, when the business scale is small, people with all-rounder skills can take care of them. But when the complexity increases, these all-rounders cannot cope up with the increased challenges.
At that time, experts for the specific functional area will be required. Without functional experts, such specialized tasks cannot be handled for a large scale operation. Many businesses have failed because they could not handle challenges of increased scale. They could have succeeded by introducing functional experts in the system.
And, bringing in functional experts will require a certain level of organizational readiness. The chances of growth of a small or medium business depend upon its ability to attract, appoint and absorb various functional experts in the business. The sooner it can introduce such experts, the faster its growth will become possible.m
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