Image Source: Mind Body Soul Developer
Many entrepreneurs think that business growth has to occur slowly. Nothing could be further from the truth.
At The Fortune Institute we coach large numbers of entrepreneurs every year, and time and time again I have seen people achieve stupendous levels of growth in a very short period of time.
So how do you do it?
There are many ways super fast growth can be achieved, but I’ll outline 4 of the most crucial ones below.
1. Raise Your Personal Performance Standards
It’s easy to get a little slack when it comes to driving your own daily performance at work.
Your business might be going quite well without much of your effort. Or perhaps you’ve been running it for many years and you’re just bored by what you’re selling. Pretty soon you’ve relaxed too much and started functioning at a sub optimum level.
It shows in small ways: you arrive a little later to work, you settle for lower product standards. You don’t give a sales presentation everything you’ve got. And before long you aren’t performing brilliantly, you’re coasting and taking it a bit too easy.
The solution is to take a step back, evaluate your performance, and if you find it lacking, decide to recommit to personal excellence.
What do I mean by that?
I mean make a conscious decision to do every important thing at work to the very highest standards of excellence. When you as the owner of the business decide to lift your performance level, you’ll find everyone around you (staff, suppliers, even clients) will lift theirs.
But if you accept low standards from yourself, all those you work with will function at a lower level too.
Believe me, all great business results start inside the head of the business owner. They see a vision of themselves as outstanding entrepreneurs then endeavour to make that vision a reality. If you don’t start with a personal vision of excellence, great achievement is simply impossible.
So step one is to lift your ideals, aims and standards and everything else will rise in accordance with that vision.
2. Focus On No More Than 3 Key Areas Of Your Business
Too many CEO’s spread themselves too thin. They aim to do everything and end up achieving almost nothing.
While in some ways it’s admirable that a business owner wants every part of their business to get better, the reality is they usually need to focus on just getting a tiny number of critical things right. If they choose those wisely, their business growth will be spectacular.
Where do you focus? Well start with these three areas:
- How to get more qualified leads.
- How to convert those leads into customers more often
- How to get those customers to purchase again.
Think about it. If you just got these three aspects of your business running magnificently, imagine how much wealth you could create.
Now let’s do a little test: How much of your time each week is presently dedicated to these three crucial areas? Probably less than 20%.
So often, business owners get caught up in all the other stuff that seems important at the time, but in the end doesn’t really improve your profits. That’s plain crazy. Get focused on what matters and don’t let yourself get distracted with the endless business trivia.
3. Get More Administration Help
Entrepreneurs tend to do too much themselves. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen the heads of businesses waste hours doing tasks that a low level assistant could have done. And they wonder why they are still at work at 7.30pm!
You must stop doing what doesn’t matter. Hire an assistant (part time if your cashflow is low) and load them up with all the tasks that take you away from making money: looking for stuff on the internet, typing, tidying, answering unimportant emails, etc etc.
You’re not saving money, you’re losing money – if you had somebody to help you, you could double or even triple the amount of time you spend growing the business.
Here’s an interesting story. Years ago I had left the company I co-owned after a disagreement with my then business partner. I didn’t know what company I was going to open next, so I rented an office space and then hired not one, but two personal assistants.
Now some people would say that was a ridiculous waste of money – after all, I didn’t even have a business at that point. But I saw things differently.
As soon as they started I got them working on any business idea I could think of – researching, organising and reporting back to me. After awhile I began to work out what my next venture would be and I hit that business with massive momentum. With those assistants helping me I was able to concentrate on what mattered most – developing a new killer business.
Isn’t it time you got some help? To achieve great things you must give yourself the time to think of great things. And it’s very hard to do that if you’re handling a mountain of urgent and low level tasks yourself.
4. Develop Something Else To Sell
If your company has grown to more than $1 million in revenue, often the fastest way to grow faster is to sell an additional product to your customer base. Is it not true that you probably have numerous customers who would buy a second product from you, if only you offered it to them?
After all they already know your company. They like what it does. And they believe in your staff and what you’re aiming to do.
That should make it pretty easy to convince a fair amount of them to take a look at something else you’ve been developing for them.
Disney did this by creating a Disney cruise line. Apple did it by adding the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch. Porsche did it by creating the Cayenne for families.
As soon as you begin thinking along this vein, you’ll quickly come up with some promising ideas. Simply ask yourself: what else would my customers buy from me? Then choose something that is easy for you to produce or offer within your current way of operating. (You don’t want to radically change how your company works just to try a new product).
What’s an easy way of finding out what else your customers want? Why not survey them and actually ask them? They’ll appreciate that you bothered to seek their opinion and you’ll get some valuable intel.
The faster you increase your product offering, the quicker new and greater revenue will come in.
Now none of these four ways to build your business quickly are particularly difficult.
And at least 3 of them could be done within a week (developing a new product will probably take a little longer).
So why not give them a try? If you do, it’s almost certain that within a very short period of time you’ll have both a bigger business and a better run one.
