Business Growth Strategies

Look, if you’re searching Google for “business growth strategies” or something of that ilk, then you’re probably looking for some secret formula that’s going to make you get more customers .

I have news for you… There is no business growth strategy that’ll be right for you on the first couple of pages on Google, it won’t even be on page 50.

Why..?

Because your goals combined with the position you’re business is in today, your skillset, your available labour (yourself and others in the business), available capital, motivation or energy levels etc, are all unique to you. There is no ‘one size fits all’ and you’ll likely need a business growth strategy that is unique to you.

So stop procrastinating on other peoples websites (not this one though, read on, you’ll only get honesty from me) and make sure you’re managing your business intelligently, bearing in mind one of my favourite sayings in business…

“What gets measured, gets managed”.

So…

Do You Know The Most Important Numbers In Your Business?

Number of leads
Conversion of prospects to leads
Number of prospects
Conversion rate of leads to customers
Number of Sales
Average Order Value
Gross Profit
Cost of all Overheads and administrative staff (all costs not directly attributable to your products or services)
Salaries (only the staff, pensions PAYE etc. not directly attributable to your products or services)
Pre-tax Net Profit

If you don’t know ALL of the above numbers, you have no way at all whatsoever to intelligently grow your sales and intelligently market your products or services to your potential customers or clients.

“But I have grown” or “I do make money” I hear you say…

Read that back, I said “intelligently” grow your sales and “intelligently” market your products or services. If you have managed to grow so far without knowing ALL of the figures above, then I’ll predict that one of two things has happened to you.

Your business is in its infancy, you went from very small figures in year one, maybe £80k for example and YOU DOUBLED YOUR SALES in year two! In most cases that’s an achievement. But doubling sales from year one to two is just typical start-up organic growth. Remember, when you opened your doors, you had no customers and you had time on your hands, so you were hammering away with building a website, you were watching How To Learn SEO videos on YouTube, phoning around other businesses to get sales, leafletting etc. Basically, if you throw enough shit at something blindfolded, then some of it will stick. This strategy will only work for a year or two until you realise you have no time on your hands because you’re spending loads of time fulfilling your product/service. This is usually where things will start to go wrong, especially if you haven’t carried out an effective exercise in business process mapping and created Standard Operating Procedures in all the areas of your business.
You’re a more mature business and have gone through the above growth periods, maybe more. You might have very high gross profit margins on your product which is able to fund a marketing strategy that allows for hugely wasteful marketing spending, still meaning you have cash left over at the end of the month. If you advertise in magazines, spotify, LinkedIn, Adwords, Facebook (which is either hugely wasteful or incredibly effective) and yet you DON’T know where your customerrs have come from, then you are un-intelligently deciding to keep spending money on all of them. Basically, you spend money or effort on five marketing activities and you know you get customers. But what if it was the cheapest single marketing activity that was getting you 90% of your business, wouldn’t you want to know? What if the most expensive marketing activity you carry out wasn’t getting you a single customer, wouldn’t you want to know?

Just a 1% uplift in the below numbers can increase your Net Profit by 56%

Leads
Prospect Conversion Rate
Customer Conversion Rate
Average Order Value
Gross Margin
Reduction in Overheads

Before you grow, what are your 1 year, 3 year and 5 year goals?

Have you thought about what success looks like for you? as in the business owner, not the business?

If not, you really should.

What if you want to retire, exit or sell in say 18 months. Getting more customers can be good for the business, but it can strap you to the business even more than ever. That means your dreams of exiting are further away. “mo money mo problems” as a great man once said.

Your Business Coachee Journey

I have a clear defined structure to my coaching practice. However, it isn’t a one size fits all, but it does work for most.

The terminologies below won’t fit all businesses, for example, if you own a nightclub, then your business won’t get many of it’s customers from “leads”, so take the below with a pinch of salt if it doesn’t seem to fit your business.

In all, you will focus on exiting your company, but while you’re preparing your company for an exit, we’ll do everything we reasonably can to increase it’s value, so you get more once it’s sold.

Also, an exit for you may well be that you have all of your free time to focus on continuing to grow the company, not getting bogged down in running the week to week operations.

My efforts will work towards your goal.

How Business Owners Exit Their Business. The Top 10
[ VALUE £??? The realisation of where you are now and considering where you’ll end up is infinite / Effort 1/10 ]
Professional Grant Finding Service
[ VALUE £1,997 / Effort 1/10 ]
I parner with an incredible grant finding service that work on a commission only basis, so they’re incredibly motivated to find any and all grants that you may be eligible for.
Quick KPI review
[ VALUE £2,997 / Effort 2/10 ]
If you don’t know the score, you can’t tell the winners from the losers!
We’ll review the metrics that are important to you as a business owner and we’ll call these KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators. We’ll be using this to track our progress throughout the entire program. One huge KPI will be business valuation which we’ll revisit every quarter. Usually, these will also include sales/customers per week, average customer value, conversion rate, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, reviews collected. Marketing channel performance. But ultimately, you get to define these and every business (and business owner) is different.
Instant Max Profits Module. Without spending a penny.
[ VALUE £15,997 / Effort 2/10 Time 1-3 Months ]
1. Vampire Hunting:
  Find the bloodsuckers that eat into your margins and profit without adding any value to your product or service;
2. Competitor Analysis:
  Explore your competitors’ pricing and quality of product, offer, USP and if they have a UCO (utterly compelling offer);
3. Why You:
  Develop a UCO for your business that’ll make price irrelevant. Nail this, and your GP will skyrocket.
4. Price Increase Evaluation
  As a result of your UCO, we will test price increases. Depending on how your business operates, we’ll try up to 3 tiers of increased prices on no more than 30% of your fresh enquiries (so that we don’t risk losing business).
  “Reassuringly expensive” DOES work as long as the UCO is strong.
5. Easy Win Checklists:
  We’ll look for easy wins and identity leaks on your marketing assets:
  Implement the secret sequence secrets to following up: (Fibonacci);
  Implement and improve prospect outreach on the most effective channels;
DISC Profile You and Your Team Module
[ VALUE £150 per person (you pay £0 for the first 5) / Effort 3/10 ]
1. Personality Profile Your Staff (and you)
  1. We’ll use the incredible power of DISC. We’ll test all of your staff to find out what motivates them as individuals, what pisses them off and if they’re the most productive in their current roles;
  2. The reports will be analysed by a fully qualified and licenced DISC professional (that’s me). This will enable us to seek out the round pegs that are in square holes;
  3. You’ll receive a report showing you how each personality profile prefers to be treated, how they tend to treat others naturally, what they fear, what security they seek and how they see themselves and what impression they like others to have of them.
    Knowing this about your staff is a potent tool.
  4. Identify staff members close to burnout.
    We’ll never seek to remove people from your organisation because everyone is naturally great at something. Finding this out early on will help when we move toward delegating the business owners’ duties in the organisation.
    If you’d like to learn more about DISC, I recommend reading the book “Surrounded By Idiots” by Thomas Erikson.
Your Goals for Your Business and Personal Life Module:
[ VALUE £1,997 / Effort 3/10 ]
We’ll get back in touch with why you started your business and deeply dive into your perfect vision for your business before we move any further. We’ll also tap into where you want to be in your personal life once you have achieved your exit.
Revenue Balance Review
[ VALUE £7,997 / Effort 5/10 ]
1. 1. Pareto Check
    Potential buyers of your business are likely to pass you over if you have a very small number of customers that account for a large percentage of your sales.
    It is possible that you’ll fall under the usual scenario where 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers? This is fine, so long as it doesn’t go much below the 20%.
    Should anything change drastically with one of your biggest customers, your business may lose that customer and cause your business to suddenly go from profitable to loss making.
    
    Do you have a small number of clients/customers that account for a large portion of your sales (Hostage Clients)? If yes:
  2. We ensure these are always treated well, we don’t want to lose their business;
  3. Address this by concentrating the following marketing activities on generating revenue in a way that reduces the dependency on those larger clients. Ideally, we would like to be in a place where 80% of your revenue, comes from 80% of your customers. While this is rare and it is unlikely that we will ever achieve that, we’ll get as close to this as we can without expending huge resources.
Explore Software Solutions
[ VALUE £2,997 / Effort 3/10 ]
When you have a great business with a great product, but using either nothing in the way of really useful software, or even using software, but with limited (or even limiting) features, it cab be the difference between great success and dying slowly compared to your competitors that are leveraging new software based tech. We’ll make sure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck in the new age of incredible automation, data and analytics.
1. CRM
  How are you managing your sales pipeline and do your staff have great tools to stay in touch with potential customers and keep them engaged and impressed with how organised you are.
2. Automation
  There are some incredible and really cheap software packages in the market that can automate lots of mundane internal processes, freeing up your employees time so they can use it to add more value to the business, product and service.
3. Marketing Automation
  More leads are won from following up that from handling the initial enquiry, no matter how impressive you did it. But most businesses don’t follow up. You should be sending at least 14 follow ups within 1 year after the original enquiry which is usually unmanageable for a human to achieve this error free and consistently. Especially if you have a constant stream of new enquiries daily.
  Marketing automation software does this for you. But finding the right package can be a minefield where you could easily find yourself trialing up to 5 packages at any one time or scheduling at least 5 demos on various packages. Your coach has over a decade of hands on experience in using CRM’s and marketing automation tools as well as hundreds of hours in implementation experience.
Mega Max Profits
[ VALUE £19,997 / Effort 6/10 ]
1. Super Easy Website Traffic Wins including, but not limited to:
  1. Implementing and maximising re-marketing opportunities;
  2. Increase qualified and relevant traffic via PPC;
  3. Create a layered funnel for cold web traffic to hit at least one relevant landing page and create additional re-marketing campaigns to target the traffic that were most interested. We’ll find the ones that are ready to buy now and set up long-term follow remarketing campaigns for the ones that shown interest but didn’t act like “ready to buy” buyers.
2. Outreach Strategy & Implementation of additional pillars of marketing:
  1. We’ll look at what you are already doing to gain new business and see if we can create some quick wins to improve the effectiveness of those strategies.
  2. Master relationship selling on LinkedIn;
  3. Seek strategic relationships with other businesses that share similar customers;
  4. Assess and implement affiliate selling;
  5. Letterbox marketing campaigns. Snail mail isn’t dead and is more effective now than ever;
  6. Close Range Marketing opportunities;
  7. How to get your customers to want to talk about you after they purchase;
  8. Call To Action (CTA) effectiveness. We’ll split test colours and positions of your web CTA’s to increase conversions on your website;
  9. Bomb blast marketing campaigns. Ultra cheap campaigns that drive traffic to a landing page, with laser targeted re-marketing campaigns ready to pounce on those that spend time on your website;
  10. Seasonal marketing campaigns; If you’re already doing these, we’ll assess their effectiveness and make sure you aren’t giving too much away. Many “black friday sales” do more harm than good to businesses;
  11. PR marketing
  12. Sponsorships. From small youth football teams to big names in sport, social media, YouTubers and more;
  13. Event marketing: Carnivals, fairs, concerts;
  14. Create and outsource a content marketing plan;
  15. Tradeshow marketing. These can be hugely effective and you’ll plant yourself right in the middle of a highly motivated (and often excited) audience full of potential customers;
  16. Reverse marketing: This is where you’ll discuss a pain point for your potential buyers and perhaps dive into how great someone would feel if they had a solution to this and they never had to worry about it again. Purely without selling your product at all, but coming off as an expert in this area. This builds trust and can generate floods of inbound leads. Dove launched “Campaign for real beauty” and it’s still going strong today;
  17. Telemarketing: This sounds terrifying and harrassive, but executed well, it is incredibly powerful. Particularly for professional services when they outsource appointment setting, charging them with the task of getting appointments for short discovery calls;
  18. Free sample/trial marketing strategies;
  19. Database marketing: Leveraging your own and other businesses databases to market your services. These could be magazine subscribers, forum members and more;
  20. Guerilla Marketing: These are incredibly original marketing stunts, like Deadpool’s Tinder Profile, Fiji Water’s #FijiGirl and the BBC’s Dracula Billboard;
3. Up-sell and down-sell opportunities
  1. Simple segmentation of your products/services that allow customers to buy something cheaper when they have genuine price based objections. While ensure we are also marketing your cheaper products and up-selling where price isn’t a motivator, but quality or quantity is;
4. Cross-selling opportunities;
Delegation (not dereliction) of Duties. Let’s get you some free time and some ‘me’ time.
[ VALUE £9,997 / Effort 4/10 ]
At this point, revenue and profit results have since paid for my fees many times over, since step 2. Now you have no fear, and you’ll trust me to engage in real change in your business.
1. We’ll list all the things that:
  1. Only you can do;
  2. Only you do, but could potentially delegate;
  3. If you previously handed over responsibilities, but perhaps they don’t deliver the best results. We’ll either consider other members of your team that might perform better, or temporarily bring them back into your daily/weekly routine, purely for the purpose of refining the methodology of performing these tasks, and create handbook for such tasks. Then re-delegate once again;
Process Mapping
[ VALUE £5,997 / Effort 6/10 ]
1. Create a process chart of the high-level activities in your business. This doesn’t have to be a highly detailed task, but we must have an accurate high-level view of what goes on in your business. While this has an operational importance, it will give you the business owner a chance to assess how things work in your business from a birds eye view. You’ll have your eyes openned to how and why some things keep going wrong, you’ll identify opportunities to improve processes too. But more importantly, we’ll know exactly who is responsible for what, while also seeing for the first time which processes are leaderless. There are many things in most businesses that have nobody clearly defined as being responsible for;
Outsourcing Review
[ VALUE £2,997 / Effort 3/10 ]
1. Assessment of what has already been outsourced and are you getting value
2. Bookkeeping Evaluation
  1. Are we subcontracting the basics (i.e. bookkeeping to your accountants) and getting charged a fortune (relative to the ease of the task)? We’ll do a cost/benefit analysis on bringing your bookkeeping back into your organisation.
    Ultimately, getting the sales and expenses recorded effectively will give you incredible data on where you make money and where you leak cash. If this is being outsourced
  2. Accountancy Fee Evaluation
    Having a great accountant isn’t just about having a good relationship with one. They can be the difference between paying or saving vast amounts of your hard earned cash. We just need to make sure the cost reflects the value.
Put your KPI’s and Metrics on Mach 10
[ VALUE £4,997 / Effort 5/10 ]
1. We’re going to make some big positive changes and we’ll need to measure these effectively. We’ll build a dashboard to track these easily and in a snapshot.
  1. What gets measured, gets managed;
  2. If you don’t know the score, you can’t tell the winners from the losers.
Systemizing Workflow
[ VALUE £39,000 / Effort 9/10 ]
1. 1. 1. Firstly, we dive into the process map we created earlier, this is a really simple high-level graphical description of how your business works. From acquiring business to fulfilment and then aftercare/follow up;
    2. We then use this to create another version which documents every action your business takes, looking for open loops (things that don’t get taken care of. Ever wondered why certain things keep happening?) and making sure they are closed;
    3. We make sure every process is named adequately and start to create interactive cloud based workshop manuals on how these processes work and how your staff/team should be carrying out these tasks.
    4. Depending on the size of your company, team and the complexity of your processes, this can be done in as little as 2-3 months. But for larger organisations, we would look to partner with a firm that specialises in exactly this. It’ll be done quicker and we are then able to hold them accountable far easier when it comes to the quality of the end result.
    5. Finally, once we’re happy with the process map, systems, processes and accompanying manuals, we’ll then work on a training and accountability plan for your companies workforce. We can’t just tell people that this is how we do things now and expect them to do it consistently forever without constant micromanaging.
    6. Change Management: They’ll be a lot of resistance within your workforce, so change management is going to be key here. We’ll be encouraging feedback from your workforce. But we have to be able to tell the difference between genuinely constructive feedback and people that are just resisting change.
Operational Restructure
[ VALUE £6,450 / Effort 6/10 ]
Don’t be alarmed! We don’t need to restructure anything here. However, we must be open to the idea. The “Systemising Workflow” process will have been a huge event and it could well highlight weaknesses in the way the business is ran and we should explore reinforcing these areas and potentially rewrite these processes.
Pre Exit/Sale Independant Review
[ VALUE £,1950 / Effort 4/10 ]
Now we’re serious about you exiting your business, not that we weren’t before, but now it’s tangible. We’ll get an independent valuation on your business from a business sales broker. We’ll also look for their advice on any issues they believe potential buyers might have and we’ll work together to solve these in the best possible way.
Full Exit Strategy Review
[ VALUE £2,450 / Effort 1/10 ]
Now we’re ready for an exit. You will have been on quite a journey getting your business ready for your exit and it’s likely that you will have spent a lot of time thinking about what your exit looks like. You might have different goals or ideas.
We’ll review the options available to you. These could be selling to a competitor, investor or having a family member take over.
It is at this point, that our time together will come to a close and i’ll want to leave you in the best position possible and move forward with your planned exit.