11 Tips To Grow Your Business

Regardless of the current size of your business, it's best to plan and structure so that you’re ready for the future. When it comes to growing a small business, a little proactivity will pay off in the long run. Here are 7 tips on how to how to grow a business.

Website

A website design that's modern and functional will keep your enterprise moving forward. In today's competitive market, having a presence is not enough.

Competitors

Knowing what your competitors are doing is a great way to improve how you're operating. You might be able to learn something from them.

Creative Value

Be open to any new ideas and remember that creative solutions can come from a lot of places.

Customer Service

Customer service is something that can either make or break a business.

Understand Your Customer

Your consumers are the core of your company. They're the lifeblood of any industry, and that's why you need to make sure you know what they want and need.

Be Social

Promoting your business using social media platforms can increase your customer reach and allow you to gain information from them.

Email list is a must

This requires you to have a funnel through which to generate leads. Ensure that your sales department understands the importance of sourcing these and turning them into active clients.

Be financially savvy

Even the most successful business need to watch the bottom line. Always leave extra padding in your budget for things that you overlooked or didn't account for in your expansion. Even small things can derail your budget. Keep your eyes on the bigger picture AND the bottom line. Ensure your investments make sense for your dreams AND your bank account, and always overestimate the projected costs to ensure you don’t end up in a tight spot later on.

Don’t forget the value of annual strategic planning

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” - Benjamin Franklin

Strategic planning is the link between a great idea and true success and growth. More of a philosophy of operation than a one-time event, it requires ongoing attention to detail and time investment.

Focus on your branding

One of the biggest struggles small businesses face is maintaining the image that they can stay afloat and demonstrate growth, and be able to support that image with actual results. Having a brand that represents this is crucial for any to cement trust in their investors and customers alike.

With a combined effort of effective relationship management, networking, strategic design, and marketing, it’s possible to create a cost-effective strategy to create and sustain this image.

Avoid these growth-hacking techniques

There’s a tendency to refer to any new company as a startup, but when the term was popularized by Paul Graham it had a more precise meaning: a company intended to grow very quickly, funded by external capital, and not necessarily intended to be profitable at first. Just as we apply the concept of a startup more broadly than originally intended, it’s also become popular to think of rapid growth as the most important metric of a business’s success. Hence the rise of the growth hacker—a marketing professional whose sole aim is business growth.

Focus on scalability

When money, time, and expertise are in short supply, it can be tempting to go with the quick (or cheap) fix, and investing in basic solutions that don’t require a huge financial investment or learning curve can seem wise.

But things are not always what they seem.

Yes, that dream solution may be a stretch and have an intimidating learning curve. But ending up in a patchwork maze of multiple inexpensive and inefficient systems that only appear economical will end up costing money in the long run.