Starting a small business is one filled with aspirations and dreams. However, once your business is up and running, the real challenge begins: growing it sustainably.
Whether you’re new in entrepreneurship or a seasoned business owner, there are always strategies and techniques to explore for fostering growth.
In this post, we’ll delve into the best ways to grow your small business, covering everything from marketing tactics to operational efficiencies.
Why Would You Want to Grow Your Small Business?
The definition of success is very different for every business, and the outcome even more so. One business may have revenue goals as its success marker, while another may see community impact as its key achievement.
The success of your small business is a key sign that you might want to grow your business. Of course, there are other factors that also go into that decision. Why you’d want to grow your small business at all comes down to very similar basics: demand, profit, longevity.
Demand
If you have customers coming to your business for a specific product or service, but you find that you’re unable to meet an increase in demand, you may consider growth to accommodate.
This could look like growing physical space, like retail, or increasing the amount of product you need to have on hand to sell to customers.
It could also look like hiring more employees to accommodate an influx of buyers. Perhaps the idea of satisfying your current customer base, while knowing you’re able to reach new customers, is enough for you.
Profit
Hand-in-hand with demand is profit. Small businesses reaching profit or exceeding profit goals may want to alter those goals to accommodate. If a business knows that it can easily reach such profit goals, then it may be time to consider expansion to see if they can grow even more.
Longevity
Most, not not all small businesses may want to be around for a long time. Think a mom-and-pop shop with no one to pass it down to: they may want to sell the business when they reach a certain age, but they don’t have the energy or know-how into building it more for a bigger sale.
How long you want your business to exist, particularly at each phase of growth or for customer demand, becomes a key factor in conversations around scaling and expansion.
Is Your Small Business Ready for the Growth Phase?
Running a small business can keep you busy enough. Trying to figure out if you’re ready to grow while doing all of that may seem like a lot.
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We’ve got you covered. Here, we’ve broken down key factors for you to use as a checklist for your business’s growth readiness.
Team growth
Hiring additional employees and keeping your business efficiently staffed is a clear indication that your small business is ready for its growth. How much your team has grown is dependent on your business.
If you were a business of one, and now you need at least four or five of you to manage day-to-day operations— and still you could use more—that’s a significant increase signaling that it may be time for overall growth.
Unable to handle demand
Have you found an increase in customer demand for what your business offers, but you can’t accommodate everyone, leaving them frustrated or bummed out?
Customer satisfaction is a massive part of any business, and having them leave out of disappointment isn’t ideal.
Being in this position is helpful because you know that buyers are there, and they want to be part of what you sell. Let this guide you towards preparing for growing the business.
Lots of cash and financial stability
Increased revenue is always going to be the clearest numerical indicator your business is ready to grow. Having a lot of extra cash isn’t the best reason to grow—it also comes down to other financial factors because growth does involve spending some (or at least more) money.
Meeting or exceeding existing business goals
Profit will tell you that you’re meeting your business goals (or not.) With an increase in cash revenue into your business, you may be meeting or exceeding the business goals you first set out with when you began your path of entrepreneurship.
Business goals evolve over time in any case. Look for patterns in your goals, where they are being met or exceeded, and take note of how adjusting them in pursuit of overall growth impacts other parts of the business.
Outgrowing space or resources
If you’ve ever been in a packed stockroom with no place to even think, consider this in your growth checklist. All of these aforementioned factors from demand to profit to team growth will impact how much product you’re bringing in and if you are resourced enough to fulfill customer needs.
You know you’re ready
There’s nothing quite like good ol’ intuition to guide you in this life—and business. Follow that same impulse that began as a thought or a need to start a business. A similar feeling or sentiment may arise when it comes to growth. When you’re ready to grow, you’ll know.
Best Ways to Grow Your Small Business
1. Develop a strong brand identity
Building a strong brand identity involves more than just designing a catchy logo. It’s about defining what your business stands for and how you want to be perceived by your target audience.
This includes determining your brand values, mission, and unique selling propositions. A strong brand identity helps you create an emotional connection with your customers, differentiate yourself from competitors, and build brand loyalty over time.
2. Leverage digital marketing
Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of online tactics aimed at reaching and engaging potential customers.
SEO helps improve your website’s visibility in search engine results, driving organic traffic and increasing your chances of being discovered by people searching for products or services like yours.
Social media marketing allows you to connect with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where you can share content, run ads, and interact with customers in real-time.
Content marketing involves creating valuable, relevant content that educates, entertains, or inspires your audience, positioning your brand as a trusted authority in your industry.
Email marketing enables you to nurture leads, build relationships with subscribers, and drive sales through targeted campaigns and personalized messaging.
3. Focus on customer experience
Providing exceptional customer experiences is essential for retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. This involves every interaction a customer has with your business, from browsing your website to making a purchase to seeking support after the sale.
Delivering excellent customer service, addressing inquiries and concerns promptly, and personalizing interactions based on customer preferences. You can build trust and loyalty that translates into long-term relationships and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
4. Expand your product line or service offerings
Diversifying your product line or service offerings allows you to cater to a broader range of customer needs and preferences. This will potentially open up new revenue streams and market opportunities.
This could involve introducing new products or services that complement your existing offerings. Expanding into adjacent markets or geographic regions, or adapting your offerings to meet emerging trends or customer demands.
Staying attuned to market dynamics and consumer behavior, you can identify areas where expansion makes strategic sense for your business.
5. Build strategic partnerships
Collaborating with other businesses can provide access to resources, expertise, and audiences that can help accelerate your growth trajectory.
Strategic partnerships can take many forms, including joint marketing campaigns, co-branded products or services, or shared distribution channels.
Aligning with companies that share your values and target audience, you can leverage each other’s strengths and reach new customers more effectively than you could on your own.
6. Invest in employee development
Your employees play a vital role in the success of your business, so investing in their growth and development is essential for maintaining a competitive edge.
This includes providing ongoing training and professional development opportunities, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation, and recognizing and rewarding high performance.
Empowering your team members to expand their skills and knowledge. You not only enhance their job satisfaction and morale but also position your business for long-term success.
7. Optimize your operations
Efficient operations are critical for maximizing productivity, minimizing costs, and delivering a seamless customer experience.
This involves streamlining processes, eliminating unnecessary steps or bottlenecks, and leveraging technology and automation tools to improve efficiency and scalability.
Regularly assessing and optimizing your operations, you can identify areas for improvement and implement changes that enhance performance, reduce waste, and drive sustainable growth.
8. Monitor your finances closely
Effective financial management is essential for the health and sustainability of your business. This includes creating and adhering to a budget, tracking revenue, expenses, and cash flow, and maintaining accurate financial records.
It’s also important to set aside funds for emergencies and future investments, as well as to work with financial advisors or accountants to ensure compliance with regulations and optimize tax strategies.
Staying on top of your finances and making informed decisions based on accurate data, you can position your business for long-term success and stability.
9. Automate task and time-consuming processes
Can you replace time spent doing manual tasks with automation? Imagine freeing up your time, or another employee’s, by automating some of the most grueling, time-consuming to-do items in your schedule.
Investing in technologies and systems that can free up your time elsewhere, saving money in one area, will definitely help in your growth efforts.
Think about all that you could do if you had a tool to schedule your employees’ shifts for you, keep track of their hours for wages and pay, and file taxes on your behalf.
There are a number of tools available for small businesses that are growth-friendly and won’t break the bank.
10. Consider strategic partnerships with other business owners and influencers
Strategic partnerships are one of the easiest ways to help grow your business, and reach new customers or clients, is to partner with other business owners, or even influencers.
Do your research on businesses or individuals in your industry that might want to be part of your partnership. Reach out to influencers on social media if you think they would be a great brand ambassador for your product or business.
11. Incentivize customer referrals
Let your customers be your greatest brand ambassadors. Happy customers will tell other people about why your business rules. You can even incentivize them by providing small discounts on their next purchase if they refer someone to your business.
12. Use your competitors
Why not use your competitors to your advantage? Competitor research can be extremely useful as part of business growth planning. Look at what your competitors are doing, what works for them, and what doesn’t. Look at what their customers are saying about them in reviews, and draw insights from that.
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If you’re at an early stage in your business, you might be tempted to copy your competitors as a quick way to grow your business. However, to keep growing long term, you will have to define your brand against theirs.
13. Stay agile and adapt
In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility and adaptability are essential traits for success. Markets, technologies, and consumer preferences are constantly evolving, so it’s crucial to remain flexible and responsive to change.
This involves monitoring market trends and competitor actions, gathering feedback from customers, and being willing to pivot your strategies or tactics as needed.
Embracing innovation, experimentation, and a willingness to take calculated risks, you can position your business to thrive in any environment and capitalize on new opportunities as they arise.
14. Network, network, network
Attending networking events can raise your business’s profile, make your brand more visible, and often lead to new customers. By networking with people in your own industry, you can also get new insights on how to grow your business, hear about emerging trends, and build long lasting professional relationships.
Once you’re feeling confident, you could even offer to speak at one, raising your profile even further. And don’t forget to build your network on social media business networking sites, chiefly LinkedIn.
15. Diversify your products or services
Your customer research may well reveal a customer need or desire for a new product, or a new variation on a product you already offer. By offering new or different products, you can attract new customers. Consider products at different price points, too, in case price is a barrier.
Another option might be to find new ways of selling products or services you already offer, for example, bundling together some that are part of the same range.
16. Extend to new markets
If you’re not already selling your products cross-border, exporting them is a sure way to grow your business. And if you’re already doing so, why not think about new countries to sell to?
Of course, you could look at opening new bricks-and-mortar sales outlets abroad but, at least to start with, consider creating a country-specific webstore.
And when it comes to shipping your goods to a new market, rapid, reliable logistics are essential. At DHL we can ensure it all happens smoothly.
Avoid When Expanding Your Business
While you, as a business owner, can get carried away amid following strategies that will expand and grow your business, at the same time, it is important to look at the DON’Ts of business growth. Below listed are some of the key areas and mistakes that business owners often tend to overlook while expanding their businesses:
- Don’t rush the hiring process: You will most likely need to hire more personnel as your company grows. However, you should not accelerate the hiring process to have positions filled. You risk employing the wrong people if you speed up the hiring process.
- Don’t neglect customer feedback: Please make sure you know who your consumers are and what they require. Make no intentions to grow depending on your tastes. Carry out a lot of market research and find out what your customers desire or would like to improve in your existing product/service.
- Don’t underestimate the cost of expansion: It’s usual for small firms to underestimate the expense of expansion. Make sure you consider all your cost areas, such as renting space, recruiting personnel, marketing, and other expenses, and how you’ll pay for them.
How to Write a Business Growth Plan
If you search online, you’ll find many different experts offering different views on how to write a business growth plan and what to include in it. However, here are some of the key points that most agree upon.
Step 1. Define goals
Set your goals according to your idea of how to measure business growth.
That could be growing your customer base, expanding your product range, bringing in more revenue, achieving higher profits, taking a bigger share of the market, hiring more people or – most likely – a combination of several of these.
Step 2. Decide on a timeline
Some experts encourage you to start with long-term goals (eg. 10 years), and then work backwards to decide your five-year, three-year, two-year and one-year goals. Others limit a business growth plan to one or two years. In the end, it’s up to you to decide how far you want to look ahead.
Step 3.Plan actions to reach your goals
If your goal is to increase revenue, for example, what are your best ways of achieving this? They might be adding to your sales team through a recruitment campaign, or increasing your website traffic through a marketing campaign, or increasing customer retention through a customer loyalty program. Think about the tactics and tools at your disposal.
Step 4. Add some metrics
Once you’ve set your goals, and planned how to achieve them, work out some key metrics to measure your success.
Try to keep them clear, simple and quantifiable. For example, if you’re thinking long term, ‘Increase our customer base by x% within 10 years’, or shorter term, ‘Increase revenue by x% in two years’ or ‘Expand into x new countries within a year’.
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Add metrics to the smaller action items too. That might be, for example, ‘Run a recruitment campaign that brings in x new staff members’ or ‘Run a customer loyalty program that increases retention by x%.
Step 5. Research and adjust as necessary
Once you’ve defined your goals, decided on a timeline, and added some metrics, you need to check whether they are all practical. Do some research within your industry and among your current and potential customers.
This will help you justify your goals to yourself, adjust them if necessary, and ensure a realistic timeline to achieve them.
Step 6. Set funding
Again, you’ll need to do some research to find out how much your business growth plan will cost to execute. Then you’ll need to either secure some capital investment or set aside an internal budget.
Step 7. Execute your business growth plan!
How to Measure Your Business Growth
You may have chosen your preferred ways of measuring business growth, but it still makes sense to get a more rounded view. When checking your progress, consider the following six measures:
- Revenue: Revenue is a commonly used metric for business growth. However, remember to balance it with outgoings, because making more money often means spending more.
- Profit: this is a better indicator than revenue. A growing profit rate is desirable but, even if growth is minimal, it’s important that your company has a healthy profit margin. However, for new businesses, rapid growth in profitability is vital.
- Market share: Again, for new companies, it’s important to grow market share rapidly against competitors. Otherwise, it will be difficult to drive sales.
- Customer acquisition: a good way to grow market share is to focus on lead generation and sales volume – which obviously grows revenue too.
- Customer retention: it’s far less expensive to keep a customer than gain a new one, so retention should be a key focus and metric. Only if you retain your current customers will you grow by acquiring new ones.
- Employee head count: of course, you need enough employees to enable you to grow your business. But you need to balance this with how much your team costs and monitor this closely.
Conclusion
Incorporating these strategies into your overall business plan can help you navigate the challenges of growing a small business and position you for long-term success and sustainability.
You’ll know which of your strategies worked best. Please make a note of these strategies and apply them again. To help your firm move forward, you must eliminate failing tactics. The goal is to stay relevant. Refine the strategy and place a greater emphasis on those that provide positive outcomes.
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