Let’s start with a basic assertion; small businesses remain one of the most influential and important economic engines in the UK. This is borne out by the numbers, with SMEs accounting for 99.9% of the business population in the UK and more than 60% of private sector turnover.

However, it’s important to note that launching and scaling a small business represents a significant challenge, particularly in the current economic climate. This also requires considerable time and money, while it’s capable of creating huge levels of stress amongst entrepreneurs.

In this post, we’ll address this further by proposing three ways in which you can ease the stress of business growth successfully.

Ensure That Your Business is Costed and Properly Funded

Even the best and most simplistic business ideas have the capacity to cause stress, especially when they’re in their infancy and struggling to secure the requested funding.

Make no mistake; securing the necessary funding to launch and scale your venture in the short-term is key to minimising the stress of being an entrepreneur, while it’s also important to cost your startup costs precisely and avoid taking on too much debt.

You’ll also need to give careful consideration to the precise type of funding that you use. Invoice financing can be a great way of securing operating capital while negating the need to take on long-term debt, for example, and unsecured business loans can also be sourced at extremely competitive rates, but just be attentive to the terms of conditions of any loan or financing option and make sure that you can keep to the terms.

Create and Build a Viable Support Network

As an entrepreneur and ambitious small-business owner, it’s also imperative that you lay the foundations for a viable support network.

This can be a professional or personal network (or both), with the key being to surround yourself with knowledgeable and understanding individuals who can provide practical assistance at different stages of your commercial ventures.

When building a professional network, you should leverage social media sites such as LinkedIn while also forging mutually beneficial partnerships with fellow and non-competitive local service providers.

The latter step can help you to reduce costs and ease the burden of scaling your venture over time, particularly if you’re able to access existing customer bases.

Create a Flexible and Agile Business Model 

Business growth can occur quickly and unexpectedly, and the last thing you want as an SME owner is for your venture to be lumbered with crippling operating costs or long-term lease agreements that are simply unfit for purpose.

With this in mind, you can ease both your stress and your troubles by creating a flexible and agile business model in the first place.

For example, why not leverage temporary or pop-up workspaces as you initially begin to scale your business, negating the need to invest in a commercial premises?

Similarly, we’d recommend maintaining a small core of strategic staff members at the outset, while hiring contractors with specific skill sets to work on unique projects.