6 Keys to Growing Your Business Now

August 16, 2018

When you break it down, there are essentially two ways to grow your business. You can either reduce costs or you can increase profits. Basically, you are finding a way to make more money. That sounds simple, but where it gets more complex is how you plan to do that. What are the steps you need to take?

If you want to grow your business now, you need to understand how growth happens and get started right away. A note here: growth hacks are just that. Hacks. They may work for a short period of time, spur short term growth, but they are not long-term solutions. To grow your business the right way means using tactics that can be replicated over and over again.

Here are six keys to growing your business now.

Sparking Growth through Leadership

Growth requires a different mentality, one that is not satisfied with the status quo, but understands the need for change. You can’t grow by continuing to do the things you already are unless you are already growing.

That mentality comes from you, the leader. A growth mentality starts at the top. This does not mean cracking a whip and telling your employees to work harder. Instead it is inspiring them through your own actions, and motivating them with why growth is important, and how it benefits both them and your customers.

That is the key. Growth must benefit your employees, your customer, and your company. Otherwise, it simply won’t happen.

Attracting Opportunity

Once you have established a mentality and culture of growth, you need to look for new opportunity. Of course, the best way for this to happen is if opportunity finds you. How do you attract opportunities?

Be Consistently Good: This applies in business, marketing, and practice. You need to provide good customer service on a regular basis, but you also need to be consistently marketing so your name is always out there, and you need to be consistent in taking care of your business and your people.
Collaborate: Too many businesses are worried about competition. Collaborate with other businesses, even if you have some overlap in product or services and do so generously. The rewards will be that you will both attract new opportunity.
Don’t Expect Reciprocity: Essentially this means be generous and do good without an expectation of a return. Do the right thing and give freely. Otherwise, it feels like you are entitled, often an issue with business networking, and that won’t inspire anyone to send opportunity your way.

You can attract opportunity and experience growth in your business as long as you follow these guidelines and are open to new possibilities.

Increase Average Spending Per Customer

One way to grow for sure is to increase the amount each customer spends with you. There are a few ways to do this. The first is to offer more products and services or premium ones so that you can upsell the customer from the standard ones you offer. Whether these include additional features, additional support, or even just unique colors and styles, these upsells can make a huge impact.

The other way is to increase prices. While this is sometimes necessary, it should be considered carefully, and usually done when a revamp of a product or a new model becomes available. This has the potential to cost you some sales, at least initially, but to increase the profit per sale.

Either way, this can mean you need to increase your spend on marketing and reaching new customers. This might mean you might even need to borrow money to make money. Fortunately there are a lot of funding sources out there for growing your business including personal loans, venture capital, angel investing, and even crowdfunding options.

Increase Frequency of Purchases

Another way to grow your business is to increase the frequency that customers purchase from you. The more often they buy, the more money you make. This may sound obvious, but how do you actually increase the frequency of customer purchases?

A Regular Email Newsletter: Part of this strategy is to remind customers you are still there for them, and have what they need.
Retargeting Ads: Once a user has visited your site, use these ads to bring them back with special offers or coupons or simply reminders to make a purchase.
Loyalty Programs: Starbucks is really good at this, and so are several other companies with points, stars, or reward programs.
Cart Abandonment and Lead Follow up: When someone fills out a form, but does not complete a purchase or leaves an item in their carts, follow up and find out why. Invite them back.

There are other things you can do like customer appreciation offers and exit offers when someone is about to leave your site. All of these methods, especially combined, will cause an increase in customer frequency.

Reduce Time in the Sales Funnel

Website personalization is designed really to do one thing: show the customer what they want and direct them to where they can buy it. This reduces the amount of time they spend looking around your site or making a decision. It also decreases the likelihood that the customer will go to another site.

This is a key to growth. It results in a higher conversion rate with less effort overall on both your part and the part of the customer. This reduced time in the sales funnel will even affect new customers. Personalize the sales funnel journey, and you will experience an increase in revenue and customer satisfaction.

Increase Profit Margin

We already mentioned this briefly at the beginning of the article, but there are a couple of ways to increase profit margins. We already talked about increasing average spending, but we can also do one of two other things.

First, we can reduce costs. This means looking at our suppliers and our processes, and reducing the cost of acquisition of goods, creation of products, or the cost of providing services. This is something you should constantly be doing anyway, but cost reduction is a sure path to growth.

Second, we can increase prices. As stated above, the time to do this is usually when a new product is released or there have been some improvements to the old ones. Also, the start of the calendar year is a great time to do this as well. Customers expect cost increases of services over time so don’t be afraid of losing them if you are still providing great services.

You can experience growth now. It takes both hard work and strategy. Don’t give in to growth hacks or tricks, but do the right thing consistently and you will be amazed with how profits soar and opportunities continue to materialize.