Secrets of Explosive Company Growth
Introduction
Starting a company or business is difficult; but sustaining, nurturing and growing it is far greater challenge. Many budding entrepreneurs launch a company with all guns blazing, but unfortunately very few sustain or grow it to the next level. Others enter a market, fail, and come back stronger. That’s the spirit of entrepreneurship, right?
Thinking exponentially calls for a different mindset than you’re possibly used to. With the right strategies in place, starting, building and growing your business can be an extremely rewarding and lucrative experience.
The "why" of Growth
If a company isn’t growing, it’s dying. Growth should be the most prominent objective of any firm. So why do you need to grow as a company? Here are five reasons growth is good.
To Attract New Clients
Expansion gives you the opportunity to reach out to new customers. Although you might already have a stable client base, there’s always room for growth. This is especially true if your growth entails the introduction of brand new services or products.
For Revenue Diversification
The greatest advantage of growth is the fact that it establishes multiple revenue streams. You will be able to provide a wide range of services and products. By doing so, you’ll not have to grapple with cash flow issues since you’re not relying on selling just one service or product but multiple ones at the same time.
For Branding Opportunities
The benefits of business growth extend to branding. Expansion presents an opportunity for greater brand recognition. Branding is all about ensuring your target audience associates certain characteristics, ideas, and qualities with your service or product. You can achieve this through outreach marketing that focuses mainly on social media channels where your target audiences gather.
For Economy of Scale
When the business grows, suppliers and vendors are more incentivized to offer you discounts, since you are ordering in larger quantities. Bigger discounts mean that you pay less to get the products and supplies you need to keep operations running smoothly. You can use the money you save to build your business into an even more profitable entity.
The Seven Percent Rule of Growth
Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, coined the 7 percent rule of growth. The Y Combinator, Graham’s tech accelerator, has minted numerous big hits, including Airbnb, Reddit, and Dropbox. According to Paul, business startups need to attain 7 percent growth weekly to be successful. For instance, if you start with 100 customers on Monday, by the end of the week, your goal should be to hit the 107 mark.
Secrets of Explosive Company Growth
Here are the strategies you need to employ in your business/company if you want to enjoy explosive growth:
Leverage The Power Of Social Media
Social media is one of the most effective, yet underutilized strategies to grow a business. Today, roughly 80% of business owners use platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to grow their entities. Why should you be left behind?
Wondering how social media can help boost your business growth?
Here’s how:
It helps you get the word out – More important than exposure; you’re able to grow close relationships with your audience.
It’s cost effective – Social media offers low-cost ad features to promote special offers and content. Compared to traditional advertising, you’re able to reach more folks and increase your audience. Ultimately you will grow your business at a more wallet-friendly price using social platforms.
It reaches all demographics and ages – The beauty of social media is that it defies age barriers. In fact, according to a Pew Research Center study conducted in 2015, 65% of adults in the US use social media.
It encourages two-way communication – Through social channels, you’re able to learn about your audience and their interests. Moreover, it’s possible to collect feedback.
It’s perfect for customer service – You’re able to not only up your customer service strategy, but also offer instant gratification to the target audience.
Reinvest In the Business
Reinvesting in your business or company can lead to explosive growth. Moreover, reinvesting is a sure-fire way to build wealth. For those in business, investing in your venture is critical to its continued growth and success.
It helps the company position itself for success in the long-term. You don’t need to reinvest all of your profits; just a small amount of reinvested resources can drastically improve your bottom-line when targeted effectively. So what are some of the ways you can reinvest in your business?
Invest in the following areas to enjoy the greatest return:
Marketing – Funnel additional funds towards your marketing efforts.
New hardware/software – The leading contender for reinvestment considerations should be adopting new tech in terms of software/hardware.
Employee empowerment or happiness – Retaining great talent means your team must be content. You can achieve this goal through employee growth and perks.
Before reinvesting in your business, you should consider the following:
Determine how much to reinvest
Have a plan
Consider timing
Weigh the risks
Do not forget about taxes
Make Use of Tech
Tech is a facilitator for business growth. It helps businesses grow by allowing them to capitalize on opportunities quickly. Digital innovation (read technology) is causing major disruptions to conventional business models. Business managers and leaders must move fast to deliver new applications and platforms to meet customer needs.
If your company fails to embrace the new technological trends and continues to do business the traditional way, you risk losing your clients. You need to identify how tech can help you create value to your customers.
With the right tech tools, a company with ambitions for explosive growth can bridge the gap between the resources they need and a rise in demand for goods/services. Analytical tools, for example, can give you insights about your audience.
The other area your company can benefit from tech is customer service. Actually, the tremendous growth in technology has hugely transformed customer service techniques. Through technology, you can get a glimpse of your client’s needs by interpreting figures and data. Consequently, you’ll be able to push initiatives that solve both individual problems and larger goals that might come up.
Great Product/Service + Great Marketing = Success/Growth
By focusing on the quality of your service or product, you’ll be able to build brand trust, improve customer retention, boost your ROI and enjoy exponential growth in the long run. In order to do this, quality is one of the things that you must get right.
How well is your service or product doing what it is supposed to do? How well does it hold over time? While some customers view quality from the perspective of price and benefits, others appreciate products because they’re “greener”, or have some other unique defining characteristics.
Product/service quality is a highly competitive market for brands as it affects purchase decisions, profitability, and growth. In reality, it’s nearly impossible to enjoy growth and success with remarkable sales and marketing techniques alone.
There’s more to marketing than just letting people know about your services or products. Primarily, you must know exactly who your clients are. To anticipate their desires and needs, it’s crucial that you get as close to them as possible. Being able to communicate how your business will provide them with solutions to their problems is key.
Professional marketing gurus in large companies know the following vital strategies and concepts:
Analyzing the market environment
Understanding market research
Product development
Packaging and pricing of products/services
Choosing effective methods of distribution
Developing successful marketing plans to drive business growth and long-term success
Orchestrate an Acquisition or a Merger
Acquisitions and mergers are an incredibly effective way of growing your company without waiting for years for your sales and marketing strategies to pay off. This option is best for companies looking for immediate growth and instant results.
The main objective of an acquisition or a merger is to secure opportunities that’ll add a service or product line in a market that’s presently not served by your business. The resulting combination of existing pipelines, key people, and products/services will allow your company to efficiently operate in new markets as well as offer better options to the existing market.
Unsure about the benefits of an acquisition or merger? Some of the perks this growth strategy brings with it include:
You already get quality and trained staff
Access to valuable assets and capital
Entry to regional or international markets
Increase in market share
Rapid expansion and growth
Build Systems
Products or services can make you money but effective systems will make you’re a fortune! The goal of starting a business/company shouldn’t be to simply ‘’own’’ or ‘’operate’’ it. It should be to grow it.
Without systems, you do not own a company – you are the company. What does this mean? It simply means that if you desire to double your revenues, you must double the number of hours worked. This can limit how much and how quickly you grow.
Scaling fast requires organisation, talented people, and a strong leadership. By delegating, automating and systemizing you gain leverage; which is extremely important for developing and scaling growth in your business.
Management should always be attentive to the company’s biggest problems and it should build systems to solve them. Installing the decision-making processes into your company’s brand conditions every employee to support the organization’s growth.
Invest in People
In addition to building systems, you need energetic and passionate employees that believe in the mission, vision, and culture of the company. You shouldn’t wait until the business is in a crisis and spinning out of control to create systems. It’ll be much easier to start building your workforce right than to have major personnel changes later on.
The last thing you want is to treat your employees like a tyrant. This ‘’my way or the highway’’ policy suffocates ideas and limits company growth in terms of culture, processes and systems.
Companies must come up with great practices for building and scaling their models over time. Management need to have strategies to overcome the insurmountable challenges that confront each business.
Both current and new employees need to be educated on the aspirations and qualities that determine success. Great workers are essential to creating effective plans. If a company is to experience explosive growth, it must put people first.
Set and Manage Your Client Expectations
In the business world, many things can and will go wrong. You need to be in constant communication with clients to know if and when they have concerns or questions. How many are satisfied? How many have some degree of indecision or dissatisfaction?
By addressing all potential problems early on, you’ll manage to offer sustainable amicable solutions. During the periods of explosive growth, it’s important to deliver quality services/products. If you spot anything that doesn’t meet the high expectations of clients, deal with it immediately. For instance, if you spot a report that is not as detailed as it needs to be, it must undergo one or two more rounds of editing before it sees the light of day.
Conclusion
There’s plenty to ponder when growing your business/company. From insurance and hiring, to new clients, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed. That explains the importance of maintaining focus and not allowing important things to fall through the cracks.
Applying the above strategies will help you achieve explosive growth, but you need to be persistent and focused. You need to keep track of multiple things at once, and always be aware of the big picture. Invest in people, tech and relationships and you will find the road to growth will be a whole lot smoother.
