Why Training Is Central To The Growth Of Your Small Business

While it’s never been easier to launch a small business in the digital age, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to achieve organic and sustainable growth.

This is borne out by the figures, as while 91% of SMEs will continue to operate after a single year of trading, just four-in-ten will be active four years later. With this in mind, it’s important that small businesses take proactive steps towards safeguarding their future growth and building a foundation for longevity.

In this article, we’ll look at the role that ongoing training plays in this and ask why it’s so important in the current, small business climate.

3 Reasons why Growth is so Important to Small Business Growth

On a fundamental level, training creates a culture of positive and forward-thinking within the workplace. It also has the potential to stimulate proactive thinking from employees, empowering them as effective problem solvers and effective, future leaders.

Here are three additional reasons why training plays such a pivotal role in business growth.

1. Training Breeds a Consistent Approach and Attitude

It’s well known that brand awareness is also central to small business growth, but this requires you to develop a consistent and recognisable identity. Beyond this, it also requires to you develop a consistent approach to sales, marketing and customer service, as these core business elements can serve as key differentiators in competitive markets.

Training can help in this regard, as it breeds a consistent approach among your employees and affords them the type forward-thinking attitude that constantly seeks out opportunities for improvement.

The benefits of this are evident in a number of sectors, including the hairdressing industry. This market relies on large suppliers and training resources like Capital Hair and Beauty, which provide consistent learning materials, kits, training heads and even beginner courses to aspiring operators throughout the UK.

This ensures that employees within this market are trained to a high and consistent standard, and this in turn creates a workforce that employees can rely on at all times.

2. Training Can be Used to Develop Soft Skills

One of the key benefits of training is that it can teach specialist and so-called ‘hard’ skills, which may be central to each employees’ precise role and job description.

Training can also be deployed to develop soft skills such as communication and listening, which are central to effective collaboration and create the leaders of tomorrow.

Communicating ideas and feedback is crucial if teams are to successfully work together and deliver results, for example, while the ability to listen to constructive feedback from senior also helps to guide each individuals’ unique growth path.

It’s also important to note that soft skills are inherently transferable, meaning that they can benefit all areas of your small business and at a number of different points in time.

3. Effective Training can Save Money

One of the biggest challenges facing business longevity is establishing a consistent stream of working capital, so it’s imperative that SMEs strive to reduce their operational costs from the outset.

Now, while training may seem like an additional expense, it’s one that can deliver long-term savings while creating new and exciting opportunities for growth.

It’s a well-known fact that retaining existing customers is around five-times cheaper than acquiring new ones,and the same principle can be applied to recruitment. Businesses with a high staff turnover or a lack of training are constantly looking to recruit expensive talent, while paying higher wages for employees with an advanced skill-set.

Companies that develop their own talent and invest in potential are more likely to maintain a consistent workforce, however, and one that contributes to an extremely cost-effective business model.

Source: business-achievers.com