10 successful entrepreneurs ' advice on the expansion of startups

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What's the downside of startups choosing to expand? If there is real demand in the market and you decide to expand, then obviously it is right.

However, the rash of rapid expansion will be accompanied by serious growth problems, especially in the human resources and accounting of the two sectors. To that end, we interviewed young entrepreneur Council (YEC), 10 successful entrepreneurs, and asked them to share some of their experiences in corporate expansion and the advice of the founders who started expanding in the new year.

1. Remote expansion

The biggest problem with expansion is your corresponding expense. The need to hire office space, upgrade technology, recruit staff and any resulting costs will slow down the company's response and keep your bank account "bleeding". In my opinion, "remote recruiting" is a good choice to solve the above problems in the process of expansion. Within the staff.com, we have more than 50 employees from 9 different countries, and they are highly productive, and we don't have to pay for office space, don't need to print those payroll, or worry about bureaucracy inside the business. But this is not to say that we do not recruit local staff, we also have local staff, but they are recruited by those who are employed by remote employment. In this way, we have to bear a little cost, under the premise of the incredible efficiency. -Liam Martin, staff.com

2. Recruit high-end talent

Whether you are a product-oriented company or a service-oriented company, it is difficult to ensure quality during rapid expansion. In the process of pandemic labs development, we have experienced similar problems in business agents and software platforms. And our solution is to the talent up and down the drain. When your business grows at a steady, manageable rate, you may not find the difference between spending 90,000 of dollars on high-end talent and paying 40,000 of dollars for mediocre hires. But when your business is speeding up, you'll understand the difference. Of course, for startups, hiring a high-end talent means paying a higher fee, but their value lies in their rich experience and unmatched ability to operate a fast-growing company. By contrast, companies that do not hire high-end talent will experience many difficulties and setbacks during the expansion. Perhaps most of the first reaction to this proposal is expensive human costs, but a team of high-end talent-gathering can pull back a company that you might otherwise have "derailed". -Matt Peters, pandemic Labs

3. Master the core competitiveness of products and the needs of users

The biggest mistake that startups make in the expansion of their business is the lack of accurate analysis of what the real reason is for users to choose your product or service. As an entrepreneur, you need to spend all your resources when your business grows. You need to predict that your core resources (staff, strategy, leadership) will grow accordingly during this period of growth. The success of Yodle's expansion is due to careful and detailed planning for each business expansion. Under this detailed strategy, we have successfully expanded. This is also the best way to manage additional costs and resources. -John Berkowitz, Yodle

4. Create a System training manual

My company, Rewardme, is a data-loyal platform for restaurants. We succeed in relying on our widespread occupation of the market. Our first 100 clients were excavated in Northern California. This seems like a good sign of starting to expand, as long as we recruit a large number of sales staff and we can expand quickly. But the sensible decision we made was to postpone the expansion until the system's training manual was in place. So when you recruit a large number of employees to improve your business, things become simple and organized, and they know exactly how to get the user, how long they will get the order, what the price of the product is, and the intricacies of the implementation process. Do not easily expand until you get the user to implement every aspect of the implementation of the systematized. -June Loayza, Passport Peru

5. Premature expansion of sudden death

There is no doubt that startups are surprisingly hands-on and enrich the knowledge of computer science and systems engineering. Some of my engineers friends often marvel at the amount of data that companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Netflix, are processing and analyzing every day. The problem now is that startups are having trouble seizing these opportunities because they don't have users or customers. The premature rush to expand by startups is an extremely wrong decision. You may not have figured out whether the product is really competitive, whether the market really exists, and that you are at risk of a rash expansion at this time. Startups should quickly develop application prototypes. And then talk about promotion. -Andrew Montalenti, parse.ly

6. Listen to your users

Recognition from the user is the best sign of enterprise expansion. If user satisfaction is high, you can quickly expand. When there is a problem with your product or service, the user will give you feedback. During the first year of business expansion, my partner managed user feedback through Gmail accounts. He was a senior student, formed a baseball team and worked 50--60 hours a week. At that time we realized that we needed to make a corresponding adjustment and we recruited a full-time employee who was responsible for handling user feedback. Although Scott did the best he could, I knew that our users reacted in general. Since then, I've been pointing the finger, playing Scott's Edge, and our business has grown strongly in unprecedented terms. -Brian Moran, get 10,000 Fans

7. Focus on your core products

When we started to choose Franchise expansion business, we did move at a fairly fast pace. So we "homeopathic" test water new services and release new brands. However, with the development of these two kinds of business, we are "on the rocks" in unfamiliar areas. The company's original core business was frustrated and the new business was hard to run. So my advice is to focus on the core competitive business that supports your company's development before it expands. Make sure your business has a strong system and a flexible capital chain. Do a good job of market operation testing, uniform development business, so that each link is solid, stable and indestructible. If you start a new business too early and develop a lot of business at the same time, it is very likely that you will die. -Nick Friedman, Eton Hunks hauling Junk

8. Selective, Uniform growth

A year ago, when we released Saberblast.com, our fast-growing user demand caught us off guard. Our users will send over 30000 to 100000 of the newsletter, in which case the server crashes or the resulting latency service may fail us. It was a very awkward situation. Recently released services, not only improve the technology, but also improve the way customers join. We have the application process as well as the waiting time. After that, we open some new areas every month, and then email the waiting users to tell them they can sign in. In this way, we effectively control the risk of growth over speed in the context of demand control and user selection. -Matthew Ackerson, Saber Blast

9. Focus on cash flow

The biggest danger of expansion is that the capital chain is broken. When I was 19 years old, I had to go through this because of new business. In the first few years, our profits amounted to 1 million dollars, but as customers grew, they expected better payment terms. And the loss of big customers ' payments is fatal. When business expands, Cash is king! A broken capital chain will pull your expanding business into the doldrums. Most startups experience this, and that's the thing to watch out for. -Peter Nguyen, literati Cato

10. Fair and correct projected growth

When we are keen to anticipate a burst of business growth and ignore the market's real demand for products and services, our passion and excitement makes the wrong decision about the development of the business. If you can estimate the surplus for the next 12 months, you will have to fold the number in half and make an estimate of the resources and the cost of the data. For example, we ordered 2000 shirts based on the high expectations of how many players would sign up to participate. There were 75 players on the first day of the opening, and a whole year later there was no response so I wondered if I was running the sport or the T-shirt business. Modest expectations, and just forecasts for outside help, are absolutely beneficial to business promotion because of the creation of demand. -Steven Staley, Playbook Community (compiled Cholino)

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