Need help to grow a business? I’ve already covered the initial and most challenging part in another blog post: How to Start a Business: The 4-step Guide.
Building a successful organization can be daunting due to the effort and dedication required. However, despite the difficulties, building a successful organization is achievable.
Regardless, mere mortals with ordinary intelligence have achieved remarkable success by focusing on simple concepts and diligently solving problems every day.
Therefore, it’s essential not to discourage yourself prematurely. Remember that with little assistance, anyone can accomplish things they haven’t done before.
It’s natural for everything to be challenging when you lack experience or knowledge, but as you dedicate yourself to learning, everything becomes easier.
Have you begun your business by pinpointing the problem you can solve, identifying the target market, and recognizing the individuals you can effectively serve?
Have you developed your product/service, made sales, and delivered it to satisfied customers?
If so, it’s time to grow your business in 4 steps.
1. Grow a business: Fine-tune your approach
To sell more, the first thing you should do is to continue doing what you’re already doing while optimizing the product’s or service’s feature set and sharing it with people.
Importance of consistency and optimizing features
You’ll find that not every person you talk to will become a buyer. However, by tuning a few things, you can increase your percentage of buyers.
Over time, you’ll reach a point where roughly three or four out of every ten people you engage will want to know more about your product -and a similar ratio will likely make a purchase.
This outcome is reasonable as you refine your skill, knowledge, and enthusiasm in a specific area.
When people sense your expertise and zeal, they become more interested.
Reaching the right audience
Through a series of conversations, the statistics will start to reveal themselves to you. You’ll gain confidence as you consistently sell your product and witness the genuine interest people have in it.
You’ll also discover where and how to connect with potential buyers. As you maintain this impetus, regular sales will become likely.
At this point, you might start wondering why you need to do all of this. After all, your goal isn’t just to replace your previous job; you also desire free time and financial stability.
This is when you need to start thinking about systems, processes, teams, and tools.
Importance of implementing systems and processes
As you incorporate tools, automation, and leverage, you’ll realize that certain tasks can be delegated. You don’t have to do everything yourself. You can train and motivate others to handle repetitive procedures by documenting them, creating videos, or sharing your expertise.
By establishing repeatable processes, you’ll be following a common practice in successful modern enterprises, which rely on policy manuals, procedural guidance, and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
Recognizing the repetitive nature of certain tasks will enable you to seek assistance.
The difference between a successful large business founder and a solopreneur who still does everything after 30 years is that the former embraces the idea of having others involved to grow their business. You can scale your business without needing a massive workforce of 500 people.
A team of five or fifteen can lead a fulfilling and prosperous business.
To achieve this, you’ll need to manage with a hands-off approach, create management checkpoints, enforce audit tools, use dashboards, and establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics.
These tools help people work efficiently and provide them with a pathway to achieve goals.
When you consider your overall business system, the necessary processes, tools, and roles required, you’ll find opportunities to scale in gradual steps.
Different business models and the key roles
Now, you might be wondering, who do you need and what do you need? Well, there are several models that can work.
If you understand or have experience in big businesses, you’ll notice that they all follow similar operating models.
Think about marketing, sales, accounting, legal, finance, operations, product development, management, and engineering. Depending on the nature of your business, there could be product development, delivery, and manufacturing involved. Or, these could be service-oriented roles like engineering, architecture, dentistry, medicine, or consulting.
All these professionals contribute to the different aspects of business growth.
A simple model, often encouraged by various authors, includes a focus on product development, which I discussed in detail in the startup business conversation.
This aspect serves as the foundation of a successful business venture.
2. Grow a business: Market your solution
Number two is marketing.
How do you get the word out about your product? How do you effectively share information and express your passion for solving people’s problems? These are some basic questions you need to consider if you intend to use marketing to grow your business.
Enthusiastically sharing your product, which addresses a specific problem and provides a solution is the core of marketing in any startup business model.
When it comes to sharing your solution, marketing has evolved into a comprehensive field.
There are entire degree programs dedicated to it, and there’s so much more we could discuss, such as product development, which we already touched upon as the first module.
Marketing is all about enthusiastically spreading the word and reaching out to potential customers.
3. Grow a business: Streamline the process
The second step is sales. You must be the leader of your organization, where (after marketing efforts) your target market understands that you provide a valuable solution to their problem.
At this stage, you need someone whose role is to directly engage with your prospective client and secure the sale. This can involve various methods, such as meeting them in person and finalizing agreements or transactions. It could also involve generating an invoice, initiating the net 30 process, or recording the sale in the manufacturing system to ensure product production.
Another form of sale occurs when people visit your website, select their desired product, add it to their cart, provide their payment details, and proceed with the purchase. This type of sale can be conducted electronically and automatically, or it may involve manual processes that include detailed conversations and extensive fact-finding.
Regardless, every sale follows a set process and cycle, with one or more individuals responsible for driving it.
As you may recall from the previous post on starting a business, you were responsible for both marketing and sales, as well as delivering the product.
You created the product and successfully delivered it to your initial clients, or perhaps to several clients at that point.
4. Grow a business: Assigning roles and delivering excellence
Then the fourth step to grow your business involves generalizing all those shared services (administrative roles) I mentioned earlier.
Because, at the core of these services, it all comes down to cash, your main focus will be on booking sales and managing the cash flow.
What will you do with the cash?
You’ll allocate it to pay the bills, ensuring that there’s something left over for yourself. Cash management becomes a crucial aspect, ranking as the fourth priority.
As you scale your business, you can then address other important but relatively less relevant matters like legal, accounting, and compliance.
It’s important to note that if you’re not making any sales, you don’t need to worry about risk because you don’t have any. Risk only comes into play when you start receiving money from customers and interacting with the public.
Now, please keep in mind that I don’t provide legal advice, and I’m not a certified public accountant (CPA). You can read my full disclosure below, and my attorney will be thrilled you’ve justified his extensive.
Once you have some level of exposure and begin accepting payments while solving people’s problems, you can start considering aspects like forming a corporation and acquiring insurance.
Until then, you should focus more on thinking about the problem at hand.
Building Business Momentum
Generally, making sales is how you initiate your business. Afterward, you can delve into the four key areas: market, sell, create/deliver your product or service, and manage the cash.
If you prioritize getting the word out, generating warm prospects and leads that eventually convert into referrals and sales, then you can focus on delivering your products or services, generating revenue, and achieving growth.
With growth, you’ll naturally encounter HR and other concerns.
Start contemplating how to enhance your outreach efforts. This may involve leveraging automation tools or seeking assistance.
Consider ways to increase sales, such as utilizing automation, setting up a webpage with a payment system like Stripe, or engaging in one-on-one sales calls while delivering your product.
Remember, it’s possible to deliver your offerings electronically, eliminating the need for in-person interactions.
These are the key points and concepts you should address to grow your business.
Ultimately, it’s advisable to prioritize scaling your marketing and sales efforts initially.
Conclusion
Once you have established a solid foundation and generated cash flow through increased sales, you can then shift your focus to product or service delivery and support.
Focus on these four segments and drive progress in the areas that require your attention.
Always prioritize expanding your network, solving problems for a larger audience, selling more products or services, and increasing your revenue. This approach reflects the underlying ethos of a well-run company that serves its customers while generating profit.
By applying these principles, you’ll experience sustainable growth and avoid unnecessary upfront expenditures.
Making sales is proof that you have a valuable product that your clients believe in. As you create the systems to sell and deliver it, you’re building a functioning business and real clients who value and need your offerings.
From there, you can explore the exciting challenges of managing your business’s growth, a topic we can delve into further in a future segment.
Do you need help? I’m here for you
I hope you found this helpful! If you need more assistance or want to learn more, visit my website. I’m here to support you with strategy sessions and help you achieve your goals.
Click here to schedule a Strategy Session: https://dylancornelius.com/schedule-a-strategy-session
Let’s connect soon. Take care!
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