How can I grow my business?

How can I grow my business?

11 Most important Business Growth strategies.

Baking the business growth cake: a little of this and some of that

How to create sustainable business growth is the biggest of The 7 Big Questions of Small Business about building a beautiful business and life. There are literally thousands of business growth strategies bandied about by all the experts and gurus.

Every business owner has felt frustrated and stuck at some stage while wondering how they can take their business to the next level. And most business owners want help to grow their business from time to time, even if just to decide which growth strategies will work best for their business.

This page lays out the 11 most important strategies to grow your business to where you want it to be. All the strategies are solid and proven – it’s up to you to mix and match.

It’s a bit like baking a cake. Most cakes have eggs, flour and sugar in them, but you can’t make a cake with only flour or with nothing but eggs. You need a mixture of ingredients. The same principle applies to building and growing your business. You may not need all 11 business growth strategies, but you certainly need a mixture of them.

So, get yourself to the kitchen and start baking something beautiful.

Skip ahead to each of the 11 growth strategies:

1. Live and breathe the Purpose of your business.
2. Set big Goals, commit to them, and then be ready to change.
3. Always be Planning.
4. Understand that Marketing is about everything in business.
5. Don’t forget about Online marketing and engagement.
6. Learn how to do Sales well.
7. Customers can do your marketing for you.
8. Under-promise and over-deliver, every time with Systems.
9. If you’d like to sell something, you’ve got to Stock it first.
10. Get the right People on the bus in the right seats.
11. Innovate and get ahead of the curve.

The 7 Big Questions of Small Business

This page is all about the first of the 7 Big Questions of Small Business about building a beautiful business and life. The Big Questions are:

1. How can I Grow my business? (this page)
2. How can I make more Money in my business?
3. How can I get Unstuck in my business?
4. How can I create a better Work-life-balance in my business?
5. How can I become a better Leader in my business?
6. How can make my Family Business work better?
7. How can find the right support in my business?

1. Live and breathe the Purpose of your business

If you want to grow a beautiful business that stands the test of time, you must be able to answer the question: Why does your business exist and why would anybody care?

Most business owners can’t answer that question succinctly and powerfully. That’s bad because:

1. If you don’t know why your business exists, your customers certainly won’t either, and that makes price the only differentiator. Competing on price is a dog’s game (unless you’re Aldi, where the price is your purpose).
2. If you don’t know where to focus your energy, you will never master the greatest skill of effective business owners: the ability to say “NO”.

More about growth, Purpose and Vision:

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All other articles on this site about growth, vision and purpose here

Purpose and growth elsewhere:

• Huffington Post on Purpose
• Inc.com on Purpose

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2. Set big Goals, commit to them and then be ready to change:

We’ve all heard that the first step towards growing your business is goal setting. However, effective goal setting is more complicated than you might initially think. Most of the goals we set for ourselves are ineffective at best and at worst, actually hinder our progress. They’re often arbitrary, unrealistic and unrelated to what truly matters in our lives. For instance, a goal to make $2 million in revenue is meaningless. Why $2 million? Why not $1,956,384.13? And what happens when you reach that goal? Will you be better off somehow? What if you fall short by $100 or even $100,000? Does that mean you are a failure? Goal setting only makes a difference if you understand that goals are like a compass; they provide a direction on your journey, but they are not the destination.

More about growth and goal setting:

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All other articles on this site about growth and goals here

More about goal setting elsewhere:

• What is goal setting and how to do it well from Positive Psychology

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4. Know that Marketing is about everything in business:

Marketing is about creating opportunities to sell more of your stuff and hence grow your business. As such, I fervently believe that:

“Marketing is everything and everything is marketing.”

That’s why, if you want to grow your business, you must analyse every aspect of your business.

Yes, marketing is about branding, advertising campaigns, social media and your website, but it’s also about how you answer the phone, your pricing policies and ensuring your customers are happy with what you sell them. It’s about how you dress, how you present your quotes, your PR strategies and your warranty return policies.

One of the most powerful marketing strategies is maintaining a relentless focus on quality in everything the business does to create “raving fans”. Why? Because if your customers are all raving fans, they will do your marketing for you.

Download my free guide to finding the right help to grow your business.

More about growth and marketing:

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All other articles on this site about growth and marketing here

More about marketing elsewhere:

• Ten questions to answer to create a marketing plan, The Balance

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5. Don’t forget about Online marketing and engagement:

I don’t mean to imply that digital marketing is wildly different from all other forms of marketing. However, it is useful to pay special attention to the online space because it has become such a critical component of any growth-driving marketing strategy.

Whether your business serves food, builds houses, crunches numbers, imports widgets or makes whatsits, you can’t ignore digital marketing activities, like email marketing, content marketing, social media and influencer/affiliate marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and online PR. The list is almost endless and constantly changing with emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence, voice search, chatbots, virtual reality, drones, and progressive web apps.

You could easily argue that the core principles of marketing haven’t changed; we’ve simply got a bunch of new tools to use. At one level that’s true because people still want to get to know, like and trust you before they do business with you. However, on another level, things have changed drastically.

Ten years ago, you’d give someone a business card with your web address, and they would immediately want to know if you also had a brick-and-mortar store. These days, people want to know you’ve got a high-functioning, active web presence, including a Facebook and Instagram page, a Google My Business listing and ideally, a bunch of 5-star ratings on all the major review platforms.

The reality is, often your physical presence doesn’t even matter anymore. If you want to be taken seriously today, online engagement across all mediums and channels must be at the heart of your marketing strategy.

Download my free guide to finding the right help to grow your business.

More about growth and digital marketing:

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All other articles on this site about growth and digital marketing here

More about digital marketing elsewhere:

• Hubspot 12 favourite digital marketing tips

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6. Learn how to do Sales well:

“Nothing happens until we sell something.”

That’s a quote I once saw hanging on the wall at a big office. And it’s true. You won’t achieve any business growth (or even have a business!) without sales. No matter how great your product is, how beautiful your logo is, how smart your website is or how wonderful your employee culture is – if you’re not selling, your business will cease to exist. Simple. Sales is often seen as a subset of marketing, but I’m giving it a solo section because I think of marketing as getting the customers to your door and sales as getting them to hand over the money. Lead generation vs lead conversion. Sales is about skill, mindset and systems, but above all, it’s about making things easy for people. And that last word is the key to the whole shebang: it’s always about people. The old saying goes:

“People do business with people they know, like and trust.”

It’s especially important to remember this in small businesses because people do business with people. Your entire approach to sales must be built on a people-to-people philosophy.

More about growth and sales:

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All other articles on this site about growth and sales here

More about sales elsewhere:

• The 26 habits of successful salespeople by Hubspot

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7. Customers can do your marketing for you:

Customer service is also a subset of marketing, and if done well, it leads to more business from those customers (plus, as I said above, everything is marketing and marketing is everything). However, it’s worth mentioning separately because of the concept of “raving fans”.

Ken Blanchard wrote a little book called “Ravings Fans” that talks about how your business should always be working to do one better for your customers than they expect. If you do so successfully, your customers will become advocates that go out of their way to help your business grow. They will talk to their friends about you, drag their colleagues to your door, defend your business against the competition and best of all, they won’t quibble about the price. If you focus on turning your customers into raving fans, you will ultimately be able to slash your marketing budget in half and achieve a long-lasting competitive edge.

Download my free guide to finding the right help to grow your business.

More about growth and customer service:

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All other articles on this site about growth and customer service here

More about customer service elsewhere:

• My most useful articles about business growth and customer service
• Ken Blanchard: Raving Fans

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8. Under-promise and over-deliver, every time, with Systems:

(largely because you’ll be creating raving fans !). I can’t tell you how many businesses I have seen struggle and fail because they couldn’t maintain their product/service quality, dependability and price once they scaled. When your business starts to grow and you are no longer in charge of every step in the process, things often start going wrong. Quality becomes inconsistent, delivery times become unreliable, prices go up or profitability suffers – and your smile disappears. Once the rot sets in like that, your reputation nosedives and customers begin to look elsewhere. There are only two answers to this dilemma:

1. Stay small: Don’t grow and learn to say “NO” often.
2. Systematise: Develop systems for all aspects of your operation, including estimating, quality checking, calendar management, inventory management, callbacks, warranty repair, marketing, hiring, firing and even how the phone is answered. Systems allow you to create continuous improvement loops in your organisation (and that’s the Holy Grail of business. It’s what made companies like Toyota great).

More about growth, systems and quality:

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All other articles on this site about growth, systems, quality and continuous improvement here

More about systems and quality management elsewhere

• 4 steps to increase quality in your business, entrepreneur.com
• How to create great business systems to improve quality in your business, Forbes
• Small Business Masterminds webinar on numbers and systems

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9. If you’d like to sell something you’ve got to stock it first:

Inventory management is a big, specialised topic. It’s a subset of the systems section above. There are whole management libraries written about the various philosophical approaches to managing stock when building and growing a beautiful business that stands the test of time.

My earliest inventory management lessons came from Colin, the owner of a large hardware store who I dealt with a lot during my days as a builder. One of the reasons I bought so much of my material from Colin was that he always had everything in stock. Colin clearly knew what it took to create business growth because his business was booming.

I once asked Colin if keeping such high stock levels of everything that a builder might need from time to time was economical for him. I imagined that it was a very expensive way to run a business, having all that money tied up in timber, hardware and bits and bobs. His answer was:

“If I don’t stock it, I can’t sell it.”

I have often thought about that statement, particularly now that most operations run on the principle of “just in time”. Supermarkets have made an art form of stocking just enough and not a jar more than required to minimise shelf space and inventory cost.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that Colin got all my business for 20 years and most Sydney builders had an account with him because everything we needed was always ready to collect.

Download my free guide to finding the right help to grow your business.

More about growth and inventory management:

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All other articles on this site about growth, and inventory management here

• All articles about growth and inventory management on this site
• How to make and keep your brand promise (INC magazine)
• The power of making good on your word (Ignyte)

10. Get the right People on the bus in the right seats

it is undeniably the case that the McDonald’s model is the one to emulate (that doesn’t mean I like it!). This philosophy can be applied to any industry. If you’d like to build and grow a unique business, a business with an individual character, you’re going to have to manage people. You’re going to have to get good at putting the right people on the bus, sitting in the right seats, and facing the right direction while also knowing which others should get off. If you don’t learn how to find (and keep!) the right people and get them to do great work, your business will always struggle. That means:

• Developing strategic hiring policies
• Being prepared to employ people who might be better than you at certain things
• Learning how to conduct great interviews
• Implementing meaningful induction and development training programs
• Learning how to coach, encourage and hold your people accountable
• Getting better at delegating
• Doing HR admin and compliance effectively
• Writing job descriptions
• Scheduling performance reviews
• Learning what it takes to be a leader
• Making tough decisions when required (quickly and respectfully)

More about growth, hiring, firing and engaging people:

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All other articles on this site about growth, and people management here

More about people management elsewhere:

• 13 Strategies to finding the best people for your business, Rolling Stone Magazine 

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11. Get ahead of the curve and Innovate:

If you want to build and grow a beautiful business that stands the test of time, you can’t afford to get left behind. The pace of change and innovation is relentless. What was acceptable even a few years ago is no longer acceptable now.

Not long ago, it was still okay for a cafe to have a sign that said, “cash only”. Today, you’ll lose a lot of business if you don’t accept card payments. Even with a business as simple as mine, people still expect the option to make online bookings. Cloud computing combined with smartphone technology and advanced GPS systems means that customers now even expect to be informed that their plumber is on the way and will pull up in front of their house in 13 minutes.

You don’t need to be Uber or Airbnb to implement new technology or come up with new ways of doing business. A few years ago, I bought a house in a different state of Australia. The real estate agent gave me a private showing of the house via Skype. I engaged the conveyancer, the building inspector and a surveyor all without setting foot in the house or even the state.

A client of mine with a creative marketing agency has a team of designers, copywriters and marketing assistants all over the world and she rarely even meets her clients face to face. Another client with a small supermarket chain has technology in his stores that allows him to see what’s going on in every area as well as getting live access to each of the store’s point-of-sale (POS) systems. He’s also put a bunch of tablet screens in his stores that allow people to find dinner recipes incorporating the fresh vegetables he has on special.

And all this stuff is only the beginning. It won’t be long before artificial intelligence is integrated into doctor’s surgeries, lawyer’s offices and copywriting agencies. If you think that technology and innovation won’t have a massive impact on the way you do business and how you create business growth, you are kidding yourself.

Download my free guide to finding the right help to grow your business.

More about growth and innovation here:

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All other articles on this site about growth, and innovation here

More about innovation elsewhere:

• Innovation, the basics, Business Queensland 

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