It is not easy to scale up your company when you need to deal with things like sales, marketing, interacting with customers and employees, understanding taxes, and corporate compliance. To grow your business efficiently and quickly, you shift your focus from priorities to challenges.
When starting a business, the main target is establishing a brand and growing the business. However, it may not happen overnight as growth is an ongoing process that requires effort, time, patience, and dedication. Here are a few secrets to help you reach growth milestones that catapult a business to success.
- Hire right people
The first responsibility of a business is to hire the right people in the company, as the business operation is dependent on the workforce. For example, if you hire an accountant unknown to your industry to save money, can they help you understand complex accounting processes?
- Understand and retain customer base
Industry giants always focus on their customers. To grow your business, you must understand your customers’ wants, demands, and motives and implement them in your sales & marketing plans and communication efforts.
- Build sales funnel
Building a sales funnel helps your business grow quickly. It creates a part for prospective customers to purchase your product or services. You can get an effective expansion by increasing customers from one level to another of the funnel.
These sales funnels can include a retail store, an online website, a sales team, or personal consultation. It helps you to accurately predict sales numbers so that you can plan strategies to improve them fast.
- A 60/20/20 approach for time management
Use your 60% time to focus on tasks that add value to your business and can only be performed by you. For the other 40%, divide it into categories as 20% for planning and 20% for strategizing. Make plans on how to dedicate time to resources and schedule for business operations, while strategizing refers to time evolution to improve your business performance.
- Understand your numbers
You can outsource your accounting tasks to a firm like Experlu or install an accounting software for small businesses to observe your numbers, gross margin, net profit, credit scores, etc. Understanding business finances is an essential element of business growth. An accountant will suggest measures to make changes, inclusions or elimination of operations, change in business pattern, etc., from the insights driven by data analysis.
- Make strategic acquisition
A business grows by controlling its costs and maximizing profits. You can acquire small companies with ancillary services to maintain the cost of primary business and increase the consumer base.
You can also go for product diversification by merging with other companies or into a partnership business. Customers prefer to buy all products from a trusted point of contact instead of numerous providers. Thus, you can make more profits.
- Know your competition
When taking a business to market, look at what you can offer to consumers and research your competitors. Rapid business expansion and competitor analysis are essential as it figures out the industry’s best practices and helps you find opportunities or gaps in your current business operating process.
- Have a solid marketing strategy
A solid marketing strategy can increase your qualified leads and help you grow your business. Create profiles and significant social media platforms that help you better market your business and interact with potential customers. Stop putting the same message to your target customers and try to create different contents that provide them value and build relationships. These contents may include industry insights, tips, tricks, etc.
- Be adaptable
A successful startup must have the ability to switch directions in response to market changes. Being adaptable opens doors to testing different business approaches and greater opportunities.
You can also target new markets to increase your customer base but make sure you’re ready to offer the best in each market segment.
- Reduce risks
Risk is an inevitable part of businesses, and it is impossible to control them, but you can limit specific internal and external threats to your business and its growth. You need to strengthen your cyberinfrastructure to leverage strong cyber security in the company.
Conclusion
Here are a few secrets for entrepreneurs to grow and expand their business. However, you can consult with professionals to get additional help and support. Hiring an accountant during the growth stages is also a great idea as they know your industry, market trends, competitors, and consumer demands.
When planning to expand your business, you cannot stand in one place, but keep changing your business, sales, and marketing strategies, and consider several other steps to business growth.
Article by Priya working with 123Financials an accounting firm.