What makes a successful small business? Ask any entrepreneur (or fan of Dragon’s Den) and a few answers are bound to crop up: vision, reliability, trustworthiness and determination to name a few. No less important – but often overlooked – is great communication.

Effective communication has been found to drive productivity, revenue, customer satisfaction and brand reputation. In other words, it supports the critical pillars of every small business. However, too often, as businesses grow, communication struggles to scale. And no matter how great the business, the product or the leadership, no business is immune to being tripped up by poor communication.

So, with workplace communication continuing to evolve, with changes accelerated by the rapid rise of generative AI, what pitfalls should growing businesses look out for, and how can they be avoided?

Communication evolves as you grow

Every business's growth journey is different. However, the communication challenges growing businesses face on that journey are remarkably uniform. They usually stem from the simple fact that more people creates more complexity. When there’s only five of you, even without a great system or approach to communication, you can more or less stay on top of what’s happening across the business, because there’s not a huge amount of information being shared at all times. Scale that up to 50 or 100, though, and things start to get messy quickly.

There are two communication traps that small businesses often fall into during this stage of growth. The first is that things simply get chaotic. Email threads grow to unmanageable lengths with people being missed on ‘cc’ or, alternatively, finding their inboxes flooded with irrelevant messages. Leaders struggle to separate signals from noise, and everyone spends too much time trying to find relevant information. Communication is relatively open, but it’s very overwhelming.

The second trap is almost the opposite. Communication is reasonably ordered, but very closed off. This is what happens when businesses grow in silos. Teams are divided between their departments and within those departments, communication is – just about – manageable.

Unfortunately, as soon as those teams want to find out what’s happening elsewhere, or need to partner up with another department – whether that’s sales and marketing, or finance and legal – trouble arises. There’s no common system or way of working, communication expectations and norms are different and, all too easily, the only way around it is to remain closed off or open things up to the chaotic first approach.

When you add in other factors like hybrid work and international time zones, these potential challenges become even greater. But while some growing pains are to be expected, small businesses communication challenges like these don’t have to be inevitable.

Forging a better path for communication growth

There is another way to scale communication, that marries the best of open access to information and clearly organised insights. It starts with taking work out of inboxes and into channels – organised spaces for conversations to happen around specific teams or projects.

Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), a future-facing business helping restaurant owners and operators bolster revenue with delivery-only concepts, took this approach. In just three years, the company grew from a handful to over 50 employees around the world. By using Slack as their central messaging platform, VDC can easily organise work into channels – for example, covering guest relations, customer success, or brand – share or bookmark key documents and keep the whole company connected. In other words, they deftly dodged the two communication traps that often harm businesses of their size.

What’s more, with team members often on the road to meet new restaurant owners, or even in the kitchen with top chefs, the channel-based approach offers a seamless mobile experience, ensuring work is always at their fingertips. It means, whether they’re on the road, in the office, or in the kitchen tasting a new menu, everyone is in the loop when they need to be.

By organising work in this way, businesses like VDC are also on the front-foot when it comes to the next generation of workplace communication. A platform that captures not just all the structured data around work (like sales information) but this unstructured data made up of conversations and context, is the perfect foundation for untapping new value through generative AI. These tools can learn from the communication being shared, and offer accurate, actionable insights – giving small businesses that get their communication strategy right an extra head start in leveraging the benefits of AI.

Communication built for day-to-day impact

If we return to Dragon’s Den briefly, we’ve seen many times that great business leaders are often great communicators. They can inspire teams, demonstrate a vision and win the hearts and minds of investors. But great communication within a business takes something else – something a little less flashy, but no less important.

It calls for leaders to give users permission to embrace trusted AI tools, training to use it and to put these tools right in the flow of how they work today to make them easy to adopt. This is an approach that can scale as the business, its people and its customer base grows. It’s with these systems that growing businesses will drive clearer, scalable communication that taps into the latest innovations.

For every business looking to grow, it’s worth remembering this is what makes for great communication – it’s not all about having the slickest 15-minute pitch but putting in place the fundamentals that empower everyone to work together effectively as the company expands.

Vanessa O’Mahony, Head of Slack for Small and Growth Businesses, EMEA.