How to Increase Business Growth

byarmslem

91 followers

Updated 9 years ago

Increasing the growth of your business is vital for every start up and small business, since you want your business to be established, successful and satisfy your customers needs. Just as with growing everything including business there should be inputs into the process to fuel the growth, and growing your business does not require rocket science i am going to show some of the techniques i have used while working with small businesses. as a certified accountant, i mostly work for small organizations and growth is the one thing they all strive to achieve. “What you feed grows, and what you starve dies” Victoria Osteen, you have to know that for your business to grow you need to feed it with the appropriate resources, from personnel, to the quality of your products and the quality of your customer service, business growth requires

Smart Timing
Satisfying customers and other stakeholders
Targeted Market
Diversify

Smart Timing

Every business needs to plan its timing for activities right. Smart timing is carrying out the businesses activities such as hiring personnel, marketing strategies, expanding the business in an efficient and effective manner, knowing when and how to execute derived objectives. This is one of the main methods to enhance and augment productivity, thereby improving growth. Hiring employees when there is an actual need to fill a gap an already stretched team is right timing rather than hiring staff for future needs and expectations, without much to be done the staff gets discouraged with lack of challenges in the job reducing performance of the overall team. carrying marketing strategies requires perfect timing, since the success of this will mean growth in sales and customer base, now and ill calculated strategy would do the opposite. someone in the hotel business would offer attractive prices and other marketing techniques during the off peak seasons when the holidays are over rather than during the holidays. Whether you choose to expand your business by ploughing back profit, or financing from bank loans, you should be able to know when, where and how you will go about the process from financing to setting up. Smart timing is therefore a necessary strategy for growing your business, which takes into consideration the execution of sub objectives.

Satisfying Customers and other stake holders

“Customer is King” motto for every business, without a paying customer you are out of business, it is therefore vital that you consider the satisfaction of your customers when making plans on growing your business. Customer satisfaction ranges from how your product meets the customers needs and solves their problem accurately to having a good customer service, maintaining a good relationship with your customers is vital, as this builds trust. Customers still remain one of the most important marketing mechanisms that can promote your business by word of mouth, those who become your customers as a result from a referal of another customer are more likely to stay than customers acquired from other sources because they trust someone who has already experienced your product, before you start going for money first build trust. Growing your customer base of satisfied paying customers that will come back is so simple by checking the cost of customer acquisition(COCA) and comparing that with the life time value(LTV) of your customer, if the LTV exceeds the COCA then it is not worth while pursuing that customer you can also use marketing techniques that limits the COCA if you realise the need to acquire that particular market or customer. But customers are not the only stake holders that requires satisfaction. employees, investors, suppliers and even the community you are engaged with needs to be satisfied if growth is required, satisfied shareholders can mean more investment while satisfied employees will work efficiently to achieve the objectives at the required. So if you want to grow your business you need to ask yourself how can you satisfy your customers and other stake holders? the answer BUILD TRUST

Target Market

whether you intend to apply the smart timing strategy or satisfy your customers and other stake holders, you must consider your target market, you do not want to spend thousand of dollars in advertising only to find out that you did not reach your targeted customers. Target Market is that market which has your paying customers and allows you grow into other markets easily. it is therefore imperative that you segment your market and know your beach head market. whether you are launching a new product or expanding your existing one. (you can read my article Entrepreneur ship can be thought). identifying your target market will guarantee growth as you will serve your specific customers directly by knowing where they are and how to reach them. The best step of growth is starting small and then expanding, as a tree comes about through planting a little seed so you can grow your business by identifying a particular segment and occupying it before moving to other markets “try to catch three rabitts and you will not catch any, focusing on one and you will get it”.

Diversify.

Small-business consultant McGuckin offers several ideas for diversifying your product or service line:
Sell complementary products or services
Teach adult education or other types of classes
Import or export yours or others’ products
Become a paid speaker or columnist
“Diversifying is an excellent growth strategy, as it allows you to have multiple streams of income that can often fill seasonal voids and, of course, increase sales and profit margins,” says McGuckin, who diversified from an accounting, tax and consulting business to speaking, writing and publishing.
Diversifying was always in the works for Darien, Connecticut, entrepreneurs Rebecca Cutler and Jennifer Krane, creators of the”raising a racquet” line of maternity tenniswear , launched in 2002. “We had always planned to expand into other ‘thematic’ kits, consistent with our philosophies of versatility, style, health and fun,” says Cutler. “Once we’d begun to establish a loyal wholesale customer base and achieve some retail brand recognition, we then broadened our product base with two line extensions, ‘raising a racquet golf’ and ‘raising a racquet yoga.'”
Rolling out the new lines last year allowed the partners’ current retail outlets to carry more of their inventory. “It also broadened our target audience and increased our presence in the marketplace, giving us the credibility to approach much larger retailers,” notes Cutler, who expects to double their 2003 sales this year and further diversify the company’s product lines. “As proof, we’ve recently been selected by Bloomingdale’s, A Pea in the Pod and Mimi Maternity.” credit entrepreneur.com

As always your comments are most appreciated.