3 Steps to Growing Your Business

When it comes to growing a business a lot of clients reach out to SP Solutions for help but, looking at their business, we often find that it isn’t trading or operating that well. If you have a business that is poorly run and your goal is to grow it, you’re just going to end up with a bigger, poorly run business! Growth won’t fix the problems because you’ve got to fix the business first. I believe that if you want to grow your business, you’ve got to go through a three-step process.

 
The first step – you’ve got to get better
The first step of the process is that you need to get on top of things and make your business better.

A few years ago, a client of SP Solutions wanted to go grow his business quite significantly, but the business just wasn’t ready. It didn’t have the right financial processes in place, the systems were very poor and the management system needed work. The business owner was overworked and struggling working long hours trying to keep it all afloat, and in the end, he just couldn’t keep the whole thing together and it fell over. We don’t like to see our clients to go through that which is why the first step to effective growth is, you’ve got to get better.

In the previous article we stressed that you’ve got to know your numbers and how you need to be on top of your financials with a strong financial system in place. It’s vital to know your numbers and develop your systems so your business can cope with growth when it happens and you want to make sure your business is profitable, because what’s the point of going into business if it’s not profitable? Growth won’t make it more profitable. To grow your business profitably you’ve got to get the pricing right and the people right. Can your own people cope with the growth or do you need to put in a management structure to cope with the growth? Is your business efficient? Your business has got to have sustainable cash flow to grow. So the first step is you’ve got to get better.

The second step – create further capacity

Now that you’ve worked on making the business better you should have more time to focus on the right things. Focus on the things that will improve your efficiency even further and create more capacity from the existing resources. This will give you the time to really look at improving your business and by improving your business, you’re then going to create further capacity.

The third step – start to grow

After going through steps 1 and 2, you’ve created some capacity and better systems, so you can start focusing. Knowing your numbers will guide you in where to start focusing on the right areas to grow your business, like where to find the ideal customers, or working on the more profitable areas of your business. This is what you should be focusing on doing, rather than overworking yourself trying to keep everything afloat.

That’s what I believe should be the most effective three-step way to grow your business.

We teach growth strategy to clients in our workshops as well as in our plan to profit programs because once our clients have developed good, strong businesses and they’re on top of things the business growth booms. This is a great achievement for our clients because the key thing, as a business owner, is if you’re spending all your energy and effort on trying to keep the whole business afloat and managing all areas in your business, your business just won’t grow, it’ll only grow to the level of your capacity.

Your focus, I believe, as a business owner, should be growing your business.

You should be the force behind the growth strategy in your business, and you should delegate every other single job out of your business, but you can’t delegate the growth strategy of the business. That’s your responsibility.

If you are looking to grow your business SP Solutions experienced business advisors can help you. Click here to contact us and help you get your business on the path to success!