Growing your business can be a difficult and often frustrating process. No matter how talented, experienced, or proficient you are as a leader, business development may be draining your energy, funds, and desire to achieve the original plans you had for your company. Yet growing your business is a critical step in maximizing your company’s potential and in revenue enhancement. So how do you achieve success? You need a growth strategy.
Here are a few ideas to get you started. These ideas work regardless of the size of your business, the customers you serve or geographical considerations.
Leveraging. Every business should be looking for ways to leverage every thing they do in multiple ways. The question to ask yourself before beginning anything – be it a new service, a product offering, or an innovative idea - is how else you might be able to leverage it. Does it offer opportunities for joint ventures with others? Can you productize the service in some way? What other ways can you leverage this to maximize the investment you are making? Everything you do or create has the opportunity to be leveraged in multiple ways if you think creatively.
Relationship-building. Relationships are key to growth. You must build high trust relationships with everyone – clients, vendors, colleagues, alliances – absolutely everyone who deals with your business in any way, shape or form. The more people who know you, who understand your ethics and values, how you work and what they can expect from you, the greater your chances of these people referring business. Your ability to ask for referrals and get them is also increased. Often we think of those high trust relationships as being with clients or perhaps staff. Yet the truth is that relationship-building crosses over into all facets of your business.
Clarity. You need clear job descriptions and understandable metrics for all staff. Sounds silly right – how can this grow the business? But the clearer these pieces are the greater productivity you will have. Increased performance leads to growth.
Infrastructure. Executives think of infrastructure in terms of technology, additional staff or perhaps procedures or policies. Building an infrastructure that included budgets, operational plans, strategic plans, marketing plans and other critical pieces for growing your company are often discussed but less often handled. Many business owners and leaders overlook this critically important aspect of doing business. How do you know where you are going if you don’t plan for it? And if you are off track how do you figure out where you’ve gone wrong if you didn’t plan in the first place?
Learning. Become a learning organization. You want to find the lesson in everything, in every success and also each action or move that didn’t work out quite as anticipated. Just because your marketing initiative was successful this time doesn’t mean it will be the next time. Take the time to analyze what made something work well, or not so well. And teach everyone in the company how to analyze and learn from what they are doing, success and growth are the outcome.
Growth strategies are essential to a company’s success. These strategies of building strong relationships, putting a well-planned infrastructure in place, leveraging everything you do are key, but just the beginning. You have to know the answers to the basic questions that determine the success of any business; who you are, which is your market, who is the potential client, and the challenges that keep your clients up at night or what problems they have that you can solve. All that remains is to provide your clients with solutions that will work for them. That is, after all, what a growth strategy is.
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Linda Finkle, CEO of Incedo Group, works closely with leaders and management to create sustainable productivity and organizational strength. She holds a Master Certified Coach designation through the International Coaching Federation. Visit the website at www.incedogroup.com to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, learn more about our workshops or purchase one of our impressive array of products.
