Here are ten things you can do to grow your business.
Contact me If you’d like someone to work through these with you.
- Know Yourself, Know Your Business
– Know who you are. What are your strengths, weaknesses? What energizes you? What drags you down? What are your values? How do you prefer to work with people? What are your long-range goals?
– Know the reason your business exists. What is your vision for the business? Where do you see yourself and your business 5, 10, 20 years from now?
– Your culture is your strategy. For instance, if your desire is to cheerfully serve, that vision will permeate your whole business, including HR, marketing, and customer interaction.
- Maximize Your Employees’ Potential
– Recognize and reward employees for their contributions. Acknowledge their effort when you see them doing something you like.
– Provide overall cultural and baseline organizational (technical) training to everyone.
– Further focus on developing key employees (your best performers.)
– Don’t just delegate, elevate!
– Be honest and fair with all employees.
- Deliver Unexpected Customer Service
– Surprise your customers by going beyond their expectations.
– Listen to what your customers say: Use surveys and direct feedback to understand customer needs and continuously improve services. Start with where you are now and never stop improving.
– Offer personalized experiences to build loyalty and increase customer retention. Personalized service can be as basic as smiling and calling your customer by name.
– Think lifetime value of your customers.
- You Are Your Marketing
– Your best (and cheapest) marketing will come from who you are and what you do.
– For existing customers, overly communicate to them. Offer discounts. Introduce new products or services to them. Encourage satisfied customers to refer others to your business.
– For potential customers, keep an eye on what’s going on online, and adjust accordingly. Potential customers will have read reviews and will already have a purchasing bias toward you.
- Be The Story in Their Eyes
– Create useful content that addresses customer pain points and positions you as a helpful resource.
– Find the watering holes. Where are your current and potential customers? Go to those places and share your story.
- Know your ABC’s: Always Be Curious
– Stay informed by keeping up with industry trends and best practices through online courses, webinars, and blogs.
– Join business networks: Participate in local business groups and online forums to gain insights and make valuable connections.
– Collaborate by partnering with other small businesses to share resources, knowledge and experience.
– Substitute “possibility” for ‘positivity”: Positive thinking is good. Possibility thinking is better, such as: “Here’s our reality, what are our best options going forward?
- Dimes Through the Front Door, Nickels Through the Back
– Develop and maintain a budget and monitor cash flow regularly.
– Control costs by identifying and eliminating unnecessary expenses. Since things tend to slip in over time, do an annual audit of all your expenses.
- Prioritize your KPI’s
– Identify and measure your business’ key areas. Address issues as they arise in your people or systems.
– Take the Kaizen approach. Implement small, incremental changes regularly for continuous improvement. Train your team to think in terms of continuous improvement.
- Make your business systems work for you
– Audit and document the key systems in your business. Start out at a high-level. You can get into deeper detail as you go. Get buy-in from your team by inviting them into the process.
– “Hire” new processes in the same way you would hire a new employee. Do not bring a new system (or process) into your business unless it brings a measurable benefit and saves time and/or money.
– Utilize free or low-cost tools like Google Workspace for collaboration, Trello for project management, and Wave for accounting. New business apps are introduced almost daily, so look into new ones on occasion.
– Use automation tools to streamline repetitive processes.
– Learn as much as you can about AI, or have someone on your team do that. And then keep learning about it.
– Understand the rhythm of your systems.
- Manage Time Like You’re Riding a Bike
– Constantly adjust. Time balance is based on continuous micro or macro adjustments.
– This dynamic balancing process is actually between the demands of your life (internal and external), and your available resources.
– Managing your self-care (emotional, physical, mental, spiritual) provides you with the muscles and energy you need to keep the bike upright and moving forward.
– Have the end in mind. You can’t make adjustments if you don’t know where you’re going (big picture and small.)
– Use tools, apps to prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance.
– Delegate tasks to employees or outsource to free up your time for strategic, valuable activities that only you can provide.
– Think 80/20. For maximum effect, focus on the one thing that can bring the most benefit.