Challenge
- Author:
- Pete Hunt
- Business:
- Fresh Element Ltd.
- Published:
- 10/11/2008 11:14:00
The hardest challenge we had to face was managing growth. In the early days, profit wasn’t that important. It was all about growing the business, getting the turnover up, generating sales and building a reputation. We ended up selling ourselves short a bit, like doing special discounts just to get our foot through the door.
But you get to a point where you start to meet your sales targets, and profitability becomes a bit of a concern. What happened with us is that we began to grow very fast. Once word of mouth developed, our order book was growing at a much bigger rate than we even hoped it would. For the past three years we’ve doubled our turnover every year and whilst that’s great, it was very difficult to manage; we didn’t always have the time or resources. For example, when we needed to buy new equipment we didn’t have the time to seek out the best deal.
Growth can be difficult to manage, as we learnt the hard way. But at least you know that you’re heading down the right line and you’re onto a good thing. We also invest a lot of our growth back into the business so we can perform better as a company.