For those of you who have survived startup and built successful businesses, you may be wondering how to take the next step and grow your business beyond its current status.
There are numerous possibilities. Choosing the most effective one for your business will depend on:
- The type of business you own; your available resources; budget; time and sweat equity you’re willing to invest.
- It’s important to make sure you’re maintaining a consistent bottom-line profit and that you’ve shown steady growth over the past few years.
- Keep up-to-date with economic and consumer trends indications on your company’s staying power.
- Prepare a complete business plan for a new location. Choose your location based on what’s best for your business, not your wallet.
Make sure your administrative systems and management team are extraordinary
- Know why, what you do and how you do it
- Become more competitive
- Focus on the customer
Sales should be the absolute centre of what your company does, every single day – ignore it at your peril. As the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson once remarked, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”
It’s rare when a business can successfully operate and grow without talented people. In fact, we often talk about our people being the only asset we have to sell, and we are always looking for ways to improve our culture, our benefits, and the reasons why employees would want to keep working for us.
I believe that many companies forget that true loyalty comes when employees believe that the organisation and its leadership team care about them personally and professionally. This, ultimately, results in long-tenured employees, which has a very real and direct effect on company growth.
When you love what you do, it resonates with people surrounding you in the office, facility or production plant on a daily basis. Showing excitement and enthusiasm cannot be reiterated enough in terms of how it drives your team to produce superior-quality work, being more focused, and ultimately more successful at their job. This translates to a better end-product.
Unless you have an exclusive monopoly, understanding your competition is paramount. This allows you to differentiate yourself, which is the key to successful selling. You must have a competitive advantage. If you don’t have one, create one.
Unique Selling Proposition
It all comes down to your unique selling proposition (USP). This is what separates you from competitors. It can be your location, your product, but often, it’s you. When customers think of a business, they often think of the people who make up that business and especially the owner.
“In order to achieve greatness, you have to fail greatly.” The most successful people will tell you that at some point in their careers, they thought they were going to fail. Not because they didn’t have enough confidence in themselves, but because they had risked everything.
