Five Tips To Grow Your Business

Here are five top tips for how to really grow your business

#1 – really understand what is working and then focus on doing more of it!

Now I know this sounds really obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many businesses actually do this. For example, if you have a restaurant, you might have five or six dishes that generate most of your sales. 

So, if you want to expand you want to understand ‘why are most of our sales coming from those five or six dishes? Is it the price? Is it the portion size? Is it the way it’s presented?’. If you can unlock what is popular, then you can do more of it. 

This is called the Pareto Principle, which I’m sure a lot of you will have heard of. It’s the 80-20 rule whereby 80% of your results come from just 20% of your activity or effort. Look at the 20% that’s delivering the results and then take a look at the things that aren’t working and drop them. 

Right #2 – we’re going to diversify.

We’ve just talked about focusing on what works and cutting back on what doesn’t, but then it’s also important to really understand and recognise when expanding your offer is really important. 

If you only have a limited offer, then you are limiting what your customers can buy. So if you think about it, back when I was a kid, you’d go to a pub (not that I went to the pub a lot when I was a kid!) you’d go to a pub and they’d sell pop drinks and then crisps and nuts. 

But if you think about today, how many pubs can you name that don’t have a complete food offering because they’ve diversified into that market? This is the same principle for any business. 

If I look at when I launched the Enveloper, I was a one product business because I started off just selling the Enveloper. I needed to diversify my product portfolio, otherwise I was going to have the pressure of constantly having to acquire new customers. First of all, we diversified into selling the papers that people used to make the envelopes, then we started selling other tools that people who made envelopes might also want to buy. 

And from there, I built a whole brand and then that brand within the marketplace gave me permission and access to customers to sell them any sort of papercraft products because I’d used my one product to build my brand equity. 

It’s the same when businesses come into the Den. I’m constantly looking at and thinking are they a one product wonder company or could they diversify and sell more complementary products to the existing customer base. 

Now #3 – if you want to grow your business, you need to start with your existing customers. 

There’s a really famous matrix out there with four quadrants – it looks at products and then your market which is your customers. 

If you think about it, it’s either new or existing products then new or existing markets and that gives you four different quadrants. 

I’m amazed at how many companies will embark on a whole new strategy without actually having asked the customers that they’ve got what they want or need. What I can honestly tell you is that it’s way cheaper to hang on to the customers that you’ve got than it is to go and acquire new ones. This is the low hanging fruit. 

If you’ve got an existing customer and if you can get an existing customer to shop 10% more often and then to spend 20% more when they shop then that’s a success. In total, that customer will deliver 32% additional value which is almost a third increase.

Now, if you compare how difficult it is to get your customers to adjust their current behaviours to achieve that, vs having to increase your customer acquisition by a third it’s so much easier to increase your existing customers’ spend. 

Number #4 – focus on delivering value.

Now, when looking for growth it’s easy just to look at the sales revenue but really you should think of the sales as being like the punchline in your business.

What I want you to think about is what leads to those sales because what leads to the sales is really going to be the driver of your value. The value is the whole package that your business delivers, it’s not just the invoices that you raise. So, I want you to think about a customer like think about your business like you are a customer – what’s the customer buying, why are they buying it and most importantly why are their customers behaving in that way? 

If you build value, then your sales and profit will inevitably follow. This way can take a lot longer but it does build loyalty and loyalty is a key driver for growth in any business. 

Then #5, I want you to actually sit and question, what am I growing?

Am I trying to grow sales? Am I trying to grow profit? Am I trying to grow revenues? These three things are mutually exclusive. Now you’ll have heard of that saying, turnover is vanity and profit is sanity. 

If your sales are growing but your profit isn’t, that’s fine if you have a strategy to grow your market share. But if you’re not, if you’re just doing it for the hell of it because of your vanity not your sanity, then why are you doing it? 

If you’re trying to grow your sales with no profit growth, actually what you’re doing is putting enormous pressure on your cash flow and you’re just making business and life a whole load more difficult. Unless it’s part of a bigger, wider paradigm shift strategy and you’re trying to grow the business and you’re accepting short term pain because it’s a long term plan, don’t just grow the sales for the hell of it. 

So, if you are growing your business, be really clear, what am I growing and why am I growing it? And once you’ve thought about these things then you can implement these five strategies and hopefully this will set you on the path to success.

Share This Article:

Sign up to my newsletter!

Stay Inspired, Stay Connected

Sign up for my newsletter and be the first to receive exclusive crafting tutorials, business tips, and behind-the-scenes updates.

I am interested in...