Growth is hard. Regardless if you're purposefully working 24/7 to gain new business or add new products, or if your growth is purely organic, it's usually not easy. Business is coming in and you and your team are working around the clock just to meet your customer's needs. It's usually reactive rather than proactive, and may often feel like you're more focused on putting out fires than on strategically growing the business.
It's important to understand the difference between Growing a Business and Scaling a Business. Often the word 'scale' is used to indicate the desire to grow, but scaling is more about leveraging systems and processes to take on more business without suffering too much.
Growth, on the other hand, is about adding capital, people, or technology to increase revenues. Growing a business requires more help.
Top 5 Things To Help You Grow Your Business
1. Know What You're Good At - And Outsource the Rest
Great entrepreneurs excel at ideas, at building, at inspiring and selling ideas. They can also be great planners, project managers, and salespeople. Often though, they aren't good at (or don't enjoy) a bunch of the stuff that needs to be done in order to efficiently run a business. Think bookkeeping, hiring and onboarding, sending email marketing campaigns, and so on. Learn what you're best at, and rely on others to do what they do best. There are individuals and companies offering fractional services of all types: CFOs, CROs, and more.
2. Hire Great People
People will make or break your company. Hire for the best and give them the autonomy to do great work for you. Don't skimp on your hiring - take the time to hire right, and hire well.
Use standardized hiring processes; know your ideal persona for a position; ensure your job
description is thorough and includes reporting relationships, competencies needed to be successful, working conditions, and more. Know what you want and what the company needs in it's people before you hire them.
3. Reduce Your Risks
Risk is an inherent part of starting and growing a business; you can't control or anticipate every possible scenario, but you can adequately protect your business through proper insurance and making sure you have proper policies and safeguards in place around protection of company and customer data in place.
4. Focus on Social Media
You may not be on all social media channels, but your customers are everywhere.
Some may use one platform over another, but covering all your bases gives you the best shot at growing your audience. Social media is key to growing your audience, brand, and gaining additional customers. The key is to be active and post regularly, even if it's once every couple of weeks. If your last post was a year ago, potential customers may wonder if you're even still around anymore.
5. Focus on Customer Experience
Do you know for sure what your customer experience is currently? Do they have a positive perception of your services or products? Are there gaps that you're unaware of that could improve the customer experience? Small businesses are more closely connected with their customers and should use this to leverage feedback more quickly than other larger organizations could. As they say, take care of the customer and the customer will take care of you.
While this isn't an extensive list, they are important points to remember in any business growth plan. Plan, rely on experts, and go for it!