Get Your Business Growth Right With These 5 Tips
Business growth doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s what every business wants. You need to prepare for a lot of deliberate growth if you want to keep expanding
You need more than just a good idea, you need to go in with a plan. These 5 tips are some of the most important things you can do when trying to grow your business.
Develop actionable objectives
To grow, you need to define your business growth goals. You know what you want, but a strong strategy needs actionable objectives. You can measure growth, so it’s easy to make actionable objectives.
Using tools such as MOST Analysis, you can create a business plan that contains meaningful objectives to work towards. With strong business objectives, your team can leave the planning meeting knowing exactly what they need to do.
Research your market
It’s never a bad idea to gain a deeper understanding of your market. Conducting research into your customers will help make your marketing efforts much more effective.
Your marketing strategy should come from an understanding of how your customers think. Their needs and pain points give you something you can use to speak to them on a much more personal level. You can make them feel more valued and involved with your business, and therefore much happier to buy from you.
Strengthen your leadership team
No one person can grow a business alone. Your whole leadership team is crucial to your business’s success. Your Board of Advisors should be able to complement your skills while bringing a variety of experience to your business’s leadership.
Consider what you know and understand best. Your Board should cover those parts that you don’t feel as comfortable with. If, for example, you’re great with actually selling your product to people, but understanding organisational structures is something you’re not as confident with, then you may want to prioritise an Operations Director.
Now for the hardest part. You have to be honest with yourself about where you fit into your business. If you aren’t certain that CEO is the job for you, taking a director level position that better suits your skills is always an option.
As strange as it may seem, you do want to build a Board of Directors that doesn’t actually need you on it. A business that’s too reliant on its founder will find it harder to secure investment and will see a lower value when you try to sell. If you don’t think your team wouldt be able to handle you disappearing on holiday for a week, you may need to give it some more development
Get your investment right
Big growth comes from making big changes to your business. When looking to fund these changes, it’s normal to seek outside investment. Your growth strategy should include a plan of what investment you want.
The most common route for businesses when undertaking scale-up levels of growth is Series A funding. You need to be as prepared as you can, or you’ll waste time with a VC that wouldn’t have accepted your pitch.
Every investor wants something a little bit different from their investments. Research your options, and pick one that suits your business. Make sure you have everything ready before making your pitch, because they all want to see that you’ve done your preparation.
Take your time
Successful strategic growth planning won’t happen overnight. If you want to scale your business up, then you’re committing to a period of rapid growth. This isn’t something to rush in before you’re ready, so take the time to do it right.
Remember that, not everything will work out as you had hoped, so don’t be afraid of failures. Often, a crisis will offer up opportunities, and keeping a level head gives you the chance to capitalise on them. Be resilient when faced with setbacks, as this is how you stop them from becoming fatal to growth.
If you have to wait a little longer to start, then do so. Taking your time will give you a much steadier footing to launch your growth from and make setbacks far less dangerous.
There’s no point trying to change certain aspects of your business if you still have a bottleneck somewhere crucial. Being willing to wait until you’re ready to move on will make your growth strategy much more useful.
Scale up successfully
Remember these 5 tips, and you’ll be well on the way towards growing your business. Just remember that growing a business isn’t quick and it isn’t easy. It needs your hard work and dedication to succeed.
If you think you’re ready to grow your business, but don’t think your Board has everything you need? Boardroom Advisors offer a range of part-time Executive Directors from a variety of industries. You can find the support you need with a flexible contract that suits you.
Article shared by John Courtney of BoardroomAdvisors.co