The modern business landscape is defined by a range of difficult challenges and uncertain prospects, meaning that achieving growth for your SME or startup is harder than ever.
In this article we are going to explore some of the strategies that you can employ to help grow your SME in 2025 and build its resilience for the future.
Five steps to help you grow your SME or startup
Building a successful business is a complex process that can take many years. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet solution to overcoming the challenges of the modern market and achieving growth. However, there are tried and tested frameworks and strategies that can put your business on the right track and boost your chances of success. Here are five of them:
Define your business goals
By creating a business plan and setting clear business goals, you can establish a strong foundation onto which future successes can be built. A well-structured business plan allows you to contextualise your company’s vision, mission, target market, competitive analysis, and financial projections and serves as a roadmap for sustainable growth. It allows directors, board members and managers to keep one eye on the bigger picture, which enables them to allocate resources efficiently, and make informed decisions.
On top of all this, a business plan offers you a means of tracking progress and adjusting strategies based on market conditions or operational challenges.
As part of this process, you will need to establish clear, achievable, and time-bound targets for your business. This is essential. For your plan to be effective, you need to be able to track your successes and clearly understand your failures. Specific goals and a defined timelines allow you to do this.
Another key benefit of having a business plan and well-defined goals is their role in securing funding and building credibility with investors, lenders, and stakeholders.
By building a structured plan that outlines your company’s profitability, revenue streams, and market positioning you can increase your chances of securing loans or attracting investment.
Embrace a digital-first culture
The benefits of fostering a digital-first culture and investing in digital transformation for your SME cannot be overstated. A recent study found that a range of performance indicators including turnover and employment growth were markedly stronger for businesses that actively sought to improve their digital capabilities [link].
Digital tools and technologies offer solutions for all areas of your business. They can enhance efficiency, streamline operations, support collaboration and improve customer engagement. There are myriad options for you to invest in and you can’t choose them all, so it pays to assess where digital transformation could have the biggest impact in your organisation and use this assessment to inform your next investment.
You could opt for tools that can help your team collaborate and communicate more efficiently, thereby improving productivity; or invest in options that allow you to build stronger relationships with your customers, such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
It goes without saying that a strong online presence is practically a necessity for modern businesses. Consumers will expect to find you online, and your presence in relevant online spaces will streamline the customer journey, enhance your brand credibility, and make it easier for new customers to discover and interact with the business.
Identify skills-gaps in your business
Before you can build long-term strategies for your business, hire new staff or embark on a digital transformation project, you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce. This can be done by completing a skills audit – a comprehensive study of your organisation’s knowledge, skills and abilities – that provides a clearer picture of what your team can and cannot do.
By providing insights into where you need to focus training and development, or what to look for in your next new hire, skills audit also allows you to understand how your skill compare to standards across your industry and find out whether you are better, or worse equipped than those you are competing against.
There are many benefits to completing a skills audit including.
- More efficient resource allocation
- Improved decision making
- Increased productivity, and reduced inefficiencies
- Improved talent acquisition and employee retention
- Increased adaptability to market changes
This last point is an important one. Addressing skills gaps also helps SMEs adapt to market changes and technological advancements more effectively. In a rapidly evolving business landscape, companies that fail to upskill their workforce risk falling behind competitors who embrace continuous learning. Providing employees with access to training programs, mentorship, and professional development opportunities ensures they stay relevant and capable of handling new challenges. The knowledge that a skills audit offers you, can empower you to build an agile and innovative culture at your SME, which in turn allows you to explore new business opportunities, if and when they arise.
You can learn more about completing a skills audit here.
Efficient financial management
Efficient financial management is essential for SMEs to ensure stability, profitability, and long-term growth. Out of the approximately 400,000 new businesses that are founded in the UK annually, only two thirds survive beyond their third year. Even businesses with a sound product and happy customers can fail and its often because of a lack of cash.
According to research, only 25% of small business consider themselves strong at accessing external finance, and only 1 in 5 financial decision makers at SMEs have formal training. But budgeting, forecasting and financial planning can be pivotal in helping businesses set realistic goals, control costs and invest in growth without jeopardising financial health. Furthermore, a solid understanding of your SME’s finances is key to attracting investors and securing further funding.
In order to efficiently and effectively manage your SME’s finances, you will need to incorporate a series of considerations into your business plan, that will allow you to keep track of your business’s financial health. You can find a detailed breakdown of these steps here.
By prioritizing financial discipline, SMEs can build resilience, navigate economic uncertainties, and create a sustainable foundation for long-term success.
Build resilience
For SMEs in 2025, it is crucial to build resilience as they navigate economic uncertainties, supply chain disruptions, and evolving market demands. The global business landscape remains volatile due to a range of factors such as inflation, geopolitical tensions, and rapid technological advancements. Unlike larger organisations, SMEs operate with comparably limited resources and therefore more vulnerable to disruptions. It is therefore essential to develop strategies that ensure adaptability and long-term stability. To do this, SMEs should focus on financial stability, operational efficiency, and digital transformation. You’ll notice there’s an overlap here between the strategies that can boost an SME’s growth prospect and build its resilience. Indeed, by maintaining a healthy cash flow, reducing unnecessary expenses, and diversifying revenue streams you can strengthen your business while positioning it to grow, so that it can prosper during times of market growth, while staying financially secure during economic downturns.
Another key aspect of resilience is building strong relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees. SMEs should prioritize customer experience by offering personalized services, engaging with their audience through digital channels, and adapting to changing consumer preferences. Strengthening supplier networks and developing contingency plans for supply chain disruptions can prevent operational bottlenecks. Additionally, investing in employee development and fostering a positive workplace culture ensures a skilled and motivated workforce that can drive business continuity.
Need more resources to help you manage your SME?
OPEN SME is a free programme that helps increase sustainability, resilience and profitability of your SME.
Offering a range of free courses, OPEN SME has been designed with the busy lifestyle of an SME leader in mind. You can craft your own route through the courses to adopt best-practice, bitesize management methods in the areas you need it most.
There are five key courses: Finance, Digital, Markets, People and Community.