Dublin Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs’ Meeting: Handling Growth (Note New Time!)

The International Bootstrapping Association (IBA) is a membership organization of entrepreneurs who meet in facilitated peer forums to discuss business successes, failures and techniques for moving their businesses forward. IBA Members are entrepreneurs who find support and inspiration and energy in meeting with other like-minded entrepreneurs to talk about business challenges and solutions.

In the beginning, every entrepreneur is working just to get a customer or two.  It’s great when you land them…but then the next challenge is delivering what you’ve promised!  How do you set up your operations to do the work and how do you scale up as you start growing?  At March’s peer meeting, our Members and Guests will be exploring their Operations and Scaling challenges and successes.  Here are just a few examples of the topics our Members will be discussing:

“When we were small and had only a couple of clients, I did a lot of the work myself.  Now, we have more clients than I can handle but I can’t seem to get myself out of the operations work, so I’m just doing more and more and I’m reaching my limit.”

“I have been so focused on selling new clients and doing the work for the clients we already have, that I haven’t spent enough time on behind the scenes things like hiring new people, getting our bookkeeping systems organized, finding good insurance plans, and so on.  How can I get some help with those things that the customers don’t see?”

“Every time we start to grow by getting some new customers, that makes my workload go up and I stop spending time on getting more customers, so we go back down in volume, which frees up time again for me to sell.  How do we break out of this cycle so we can keep growing permanently?”

“In order for us to really go to the next level, we need to invest some serious money in a new (facility, software package, advertising campaign, office space, etc.).  It will be a big risk if it doesn’t pay off but I don’t see any other way to get bigger from where we are now.  Has anyone else faced this?”

“We have always relied on an outside partner to handle some of the work we do for customers.  But now that we have grown, that partner isn’t big enough to keep up with their piece and we also need some more sophisticated things they can’t always do.  I’m afraid they are holding us back but it’s hard because they’ve been with us since the beginning.”

If you’re facing similar issues, and would like to find out how other bootstrapping entrepreneurs have dealt with those issues, please join us. To attend this meeting, you must register here. Non-IBA Members can attend their first IBA monthly peer meeting, as our Guest, free of charge.