Growing a Small Business: an Easy-to-follow Guide.
Updated: Dec 1, 2022
Contents:
Regardless of what type of business you’re running growing revenue will definitely be high on your list. That’s why more and more start-up founders, CEOs, and business owners are looking for advice on how to make their businesses a success. There is no set formula, but we’re going to give you some tips that will give you a head start.
Study your competition.
Analyze their sites with the three tools available. Explore their clients, check out their social media pages and make a list of what they are doing right and what you can do better you can even check out their ads go to the Facebook ad library, and use the filters to find out what your competition is running.
Focus on building a funnel.
The sales funnel is like a health bar for how well your business is doing. Identify what needs strengthening and set actionable tasks to achieve those things. Do you have enough prospects? If not, you need to pay attention to marketing. Are all the leads closing? If not find out why, is it your pricing? Is it your value proposition? Is it your sales technique? Find out what’s your blocker by analyzing your sales pipeline and seeing where you need to inject time, money, or energy.
Keep your current customers happy.
Your current customers are hands down the most important thing in your business, treat them like gods. They are giving you revenue, testing your product, and potentially help you with your marketing. Keep them happy at all costs. Always be available, reply on time to requests, and above all LISTEN. Things to pay attention to here are:
Keeping your CRM up-to-date
Engaging with your customers via email
Posting regularly on social media
Asking your customers how you can improve
Updating your product
Connect with other founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs at every available opportunity.
Join groups, go to events, host webinars, create partnerships, engage in other people's posts, and reply, when other people engage in yours. Everyone is a potential partner, customer, or even future investor. Regardless of who they are, everyone- no matter what they do, will have something valuable to share if you ask.
Set up a good company culture.
There are many things to consider here, legal and moral responsibilities merge with your corporate identity and personality and formulate a culture that people associate with your business. Help others where you can, share your knowledge, be responsible and make decisions based on furthering the human race in a sustainable friendly, and cooperative way. You’re small now, but when you are a huge global corporation these foundations you have built will be the DNA of your business.
Always be thinking of how to grow.
When something is working, ask yourself, how can I 10x this? How can I get more customers? How can I make my product better and reach a wider audience? Who can I partner with? How can I be better than my competition? How can I make my product more accessible and better value? How can I make my product simpler or my services easier to understand? Diversify where possible, try new ideas, and evolve products to go from good to great to amazing to world-leading.
Expand.
Once you feel like you may be saturating a sector, an industry, or a location- it’s time to expand. The rules for good expansion are:
Expand when something is working
Expand when you have templates
Expand when you have the budget
Expand when you see potential
Expansion doesn’t have to be into new territory or into a new group of customers. It can also be partnering with much bigger businesses that will propel your products to new heights. Whatever you decide to do plan accordingly and make sure that if you hire new people they fit with your (by now) established company culture.