Throughout history, this question has kept many business owners up at night. Sometimes they are away with creative energy. Mostly though it is worry keeping them awake.
How Can I Grow My Business?
If you want to know how to grow your business, it’s best to start by assessing if there even is an opportunity to grow your business. Consider the following;
- How big is the market for your product/service that you can access? For example, if the national market is positive, but you can only distribute to your local area, which has a small demand, then it may not be possible to grow your business (in its current format anyway).
- Can you make a profit and be competitive in the market? While the price isn’t everything, unless you are adding lots more value than your competitors, it is hard to command a higher price (therefore higher profit margin).
- Can you cash flow the growth? For most businesses, when they make more sales, they have to spend money to facilitate that sale before they bank the money from the sale. And if you are purely a products business, you will likely have to purchase the stock prior to the sale being made. Can you handle the growing pains (money pains) of expanding your business?
This is not an attempt to put a dampener on the subject of business growth, rather it is to encourage people to take on the business growth challenge with ‘eyes wide open’.
Assuming that you are ready and raring to grow, let’s dive into the topic…
How Do I Grow My Business?
This can be a confusing subject. There are many, many strategies to consider. On top of this, there are many vendors offering their version of ‘the business growth solution’. It can be confusing, even frustrating at times.
There are many vendors offering their version of ‘the business growth solution’. It can be confusing, even frustrating at times.
One way of removing complexity from any topic is to boil it down to its basic building blocks. There are only four basic building blocks of business growth.
These are;
- Get more customers. Not just any customers but A-Grade customers
- Get your customers to spend more each time they buy from you
- Get those customers to come and buy more often
- Improve systems and processes in your business to operate more profitably.
That’s it! That’s all you can do to grow your business. Of course, within each one of those four building blocks are a number of different strategies that you can tailor and refine for your business.
One small step can lead to BIG profit!
How to Grow My Business?
If you take the ‘get customers to come back more often’ building block from above, there are a range of strategies that you could implement, including;
- Introduce a loyalty program
- Implement a newsletter or newsletters. Why newsletters? Simply because you will probably communicate with the top twenty per cent of your customer base (i.e. your best customers) in a different, more intimate way then you do the rest of the customer base.
- Start a private Facebook group
- Host special events and briefings
- Implement a call cycle with a combination of personal visits and phone calls
- Survey your best customers to see what additional products/services they use that you could add to your range to better serve them
- Any many, many, many more strategies.
Here’s the good news…
Since there are so many strategies within each of those building blocks, you will be able to find a number of strategies that you can implement into your business.
To discuss the growth and development of your business, get in contact with us today…
