Inc. magazine has a handy feature called 5 Ways to Grow Your Business. It includes:
- Turn your customers into salespeople
- Learn how to delegate
- Develop new products
- Penetrate new markets
- Learn how to automate
I like all of these ideas and you should read the Inc. article if you are looking to grow. Here are a few more suggestions, by no means exhaustive, based on my work with my entrepreneur coaching clients and my own observations about the growth of my own small business.
- Watch the competition, but not too closely. Every small business CEO needs to be extremely knowledgeable about the competition. You should have a SWOT analysis and a market diagram that shows where you are and where your competitors are -- and hopefully the box you're in represents the biggest potential for future growth of your market. You can never plausibly say to customers, investors, media or anyone that you have no real competition. That's just another way of saying you haven't thought about it. You should set up Google Alerts for all your competitors so you can read their news releases; you should subscribe to their blogs; you should do whatever's legal and ethical to access their selling materials. And then you should go back to your business. Companies that spend too much time trying to beat competitors wind up not paying attention to the market. In the heydey of print media, I worked for several leading companies that were focused on annihilating each other rather than on foreseeing the future. Who wants to be the last dinosaur standing?
- Have a people pipeline. Maybe you're struggling to get revenue to be high enough so that you can think about making a hire. Try this: recruit for the hire before you have the money/sales to pay for that person. Always be recruiting talent. Even if you can't use someone fabulous full-time, you can develop a relationship, or give them contract work or a tryout. When you see what a real superstar can do for your business, you may want to make some other sacrifices to get them on board so you set the stage for growth.
- Have a reliable data dashboard. What are the drivers of your business (sometimes called Key Performance Indicators)? Drivers are the levers of a business that, when pushed, cause sales to go rapidly up or down. A driver could be a conversion rate from trial user to paid subscription or from prospect to client. If you're in a business driven by having a certain volume of clients, cases or campaigns (financial services, law, media) your pipeline becomes a major driver of your business. If you know that you want to have one new client a month generating $10,000 a year, you have to back into that number through understanding your conversion rates -- all the way from leads to opportunities to closed business. That information should all be in your dashboard that you look at every day.
- Pick an organizational system, any system, and use it. The worst thing for a business owner is to sit down at your desk at 7AM (okay, 6 AM) and not know what you're going to accomplish that day. Whether it's by using reminder functions in Salesforce or ACT or Outlook, or even if it's just a legal pad on which you write down your chief objectives every night before lights-out, have a system and stick to it. Otherwise, you will be in reactive mode all the time rather than on offense, and no business ever won by being on defense.
- Get to know the people who can influence your success the most. Check out myGreenlight"> and Keith Ferrazzi's book, Who's Got Your Back. You need to understand the top people in your market who are the superconnectors and influencers -- the people who are "sneezers" (to use a concept from Seth Godin), who will propel your company and your products ahread.
- Beware of the one huge mistake that can sink the company. Think of the worst mistake you made when you were employed by someone else. I can think of a couple, which, if I made them now, would sink my company. Try to make sure you don't do things that will get you sued. Be a good risk manager. Do some scenario-creating and evaluate the unexpected events that could destroy your business. Everything from a fire to a lawsuit to theft of your intellectual property to a systems crash. I know of many companies who are moving too fast to stop and correct for fissures in their risk profile.