Understand why you want to grow your business. In other words, what are your business objectives.

Understanding why you want to grow might help you a lot. It puts you in the right mood for growth, makes it clear for you, and will motivate you to pursue growth. It also makes it easy for you to come up with goals that will give you a direction on where to focus on.

There are few reasons why businesses or entrepreneurs might want to grow their business. Those reasons could be any or a combination of the following.

Reasons for growing your business;

1. To increase profit, this is usually the number 1 reason
2. To meet the demand of customers or clients
3. To employ more people
4. To lower the costs through economies of scale
5. To increase buying and bargaining power
6. To reduce the threat of competition
7. To dominate the market
8. To sustain the business

The important thing here is for you to have objectives that you clearly understand. Once you’ve figured out why you want to grow you need to setup goals. You need to define your goals, short-term and medium-term goals. Remember, when setting up goals, your goals need to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound). An example of “smart” goals are as follows;

For example,

“To increase market share by 30% in the next 3 months”

“Increase the revenue and profitability of the business by 20% in the next 90 days”

“Increase business sales leads by 120% in order to acquire 30% of the customer to increase sales revenue by the end of the financial year of the business”

Two of the examples are short term goals while the last one is a medium-term goal. Once you have been able to come up with a clear business objective, you can move on to the next step.

Identify the best strategies for your business.

Once you have a clear objective of what you want to achieve, you want to choose business strategies that will help you achieve your business goals.

The are various strategies you can use, below I have listed the most common business strategies that you can use to achieve your goals.

Geographic Expansion

This is when businesses and companies invest into expansion in other locations to grow their business. The expansion into new geographies can be regional, national or even worldwide expansion of products or services and distribution.

Market Expansion

In this strategy, businesses try to expand in their current market by reaching new customers or untapped customer base. For example, a cleaning company that normally cleans houses decide to increase growth by also targeting corporate buildings.

Product development

For this strategy, businesses choose to innovate their current products or create new products to increase revenue. It can mean taking existing products and adding new features to attract more customers or encourage existing customers to buy the new product.

Diversification

Diversification is when companies create new products for a completely new market. This growth strategy might mean that moving into areas where the company has no prior sales history, for bigger companies it might also mean international markets.

New channels

This is when businesses open new channels for the business to increase sales and gain additional market share. For example, a retail company that has been selling on a physical brick and mortar store decide to open an online (ecommerce) store.

Vertical integration

Vertical integration is when a company or firm decides to take on another stage of the production chain or distribution process, whether by buying or starting their own. For example, a retail store that sells clothes decides to start manufacturing their own clothes.

Business partnership

A strategic partnership can increase business growth for two or more businesses or brands that are in partnership to leverage of each other’s business services, customer base or resources. An online store or ecommerce business can partner with a logistic company to deliver products to customers.

Market penetration

This occurs when a business tries to generate growth within their current market by lowering their prices or increasing marketing efforts to gain more market share. This is usually done when a business introduces a new product, enters a new market or tries to increase sales volume.

Productivity

Some businesses might choose to change their business process in order to grow their business and/or to improve efficiency. For example, a car manufacturing business may introduce robots to improve efficiency and increase volume, or a firm conducting an internal audit of their business to find wastages or where to cut costs to improve profit margin.

Acquisitions

Some companies might implement a growth strategy that involves buying another business. This might involve a company buying out its competitors to absorb their market share and acquire their assets, or when a tech company buys another tech company to gain access to their users and/or to integrate that company’s solutions into their own company.

Put business measurements in place; mechanisms to measure the growth of your business.

Once you have identified the best growth strategies for your business based on the objective of the business and after carefully weighing them in however way you did it, you should now put measurements in place. It is important that you have mechanisms in place to monitor and track the progress and growth of your business. This will help you know if the business strategy is working and help you tweak it along the way if necessary.

Identify your CSFs

You can start off by identifying your critical success factors. This will help you identify and focus on key priorities to measure. CSF (critical success factors) are the areas of your business or project that are vital to its success. Examples of CSFs that businesses may choose to focus on;

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer engagement
• Effective leadership
• Employee satisfaction
• High profits or sales
• Efficient production
• Reduce operating costs
• Qualified employees
• Quality products

And much more...

Develop reliable metrics

Once you have figured out or understand your CSFs and have identified business strategies you would like to implement, you can now develop metrics that you would like to measure that will help you track the growth of your business. This metrics are called key performance indicators, or KPI.

KPI is a set of quantifiable measurements used to gauge a company or business’ performances.

Examples of KPI’s are;

• Growth of sales or revenue growth
• Profit margin
• Number of customers
• Average sales volume
• Return customers
• Website traffic
• Average customer spends
• Client retention
• Number of products sold
• New customer growth

And there is more that you can use depending on the type of business you’re on, and what data you require to make informed decisions. You can choose or come up with KPIs that are well suited for your business and this KPIs can be directed by your CSFs.

Implement your strategies

At this stage, I assume that you would have now figured out or have a sound idea on how you will grow your business, the key areas you will be focusing on, and have mechanisms in place on how you will measure and track your business. Now it is time to move on to the next step of implementation.

Allocate Resources

Gather up resources needed to grow your business according to the strategies and goals you have set. This involves financial and human resources, and this may entail building relationships.

Financial resources

Financial resources may come within the business or you may find that you need funding to finance your business’ growth. Financing options can be getting a loan from a financial institute or individual, grants from the government, or investment from investors to fund your growth.

Human resource

Assign clear roles and responsibilities to capable people. This may mean equipping your existing employees, getting new talent into your organisation, partnering with other businesses or service providers, or getting an expert knowledge from outside your organisation such as our services that can optimise your business fully. For example, we work within your budget to provide marketing and business consultation services and solutions tailormade to suit and grow your business, ensuring that you reach your milestone and business goals regardless of the type of business you’re in. You can find out more about our services here.

There are also various websites or apps available where you can hire expertise around the world with affordable service. These platform have a pool of proffessional services where you can get exceptional servies for less such as Fiverr. You can click on the image below to learn more about fiverr.

Execute and monitor

Once you have assigned or delegated roles and responsibility you need to guide the team where you want to take the business, provide support. Support could be anything from providing resources, conducive working environment, channels for interacting and communication and training. And also, you need lead the team.

Address challenges as they come

Check in with the team and monitor progress through daily, weekly, and monthly status reports, check-in or meetings.

Take corrective action (adjust or revise, as Necessary)

Implementation is an ongoing process and definitely it won’t be smooth sailing like anything in life. You will encounter some challenges and therefore, you may need to adjust or revise the strategy as you implement it.

Challenges or examples you may come across;

1. INTERNAL CHALLENGES / FACTORS

a. Employee challenges

INCOMPETENT STAFF OR UNDERDELIVERY

Dealing with these staff can be troublesome. On your side as an employer, it is important that you explicitly mention and have it in writing the job requirements, description and role of the person who is taking the position. And then monitor or follow up on the employee’s progress and delivery.

In order to deal with incompetent staff, the best advice is to document everything. For example, the meeting you have with the staff, the job that you explicitly told them to do but they failed to deliver, warning given to those staff and everything else when dealing with employees. If it comes to a situation where you have to let go of the employee, you have all the evidence to back you up. So, what I am saying is that you have to document or store safely everything that can be documented or stored from day 1 about the business, everything from financing, operations, personnel and everything else.

FINDING TALENT OR SKILLED LABOUR

Finding the right skills and talent for your business can be one of the challenging things you might face as an entrepreneur, business owner or an employer. Some of the things that you can do to attract talent is creating a positive culture at work, developing an effective job description, offering an attractive package and, one other thing that is important and under your control is knowing the kind of employee you need for your business and who fit well within your business culture.

RESIGNATION OF EMPLOYEES

This might be one of the painful things an employer might come across. For example, an employer may spend time and resources grooming an employee only for that employee to resign. Now they need to start all over again to recruit or find a replacement for that individual or something to fill up the gap. This is both time consuming and loss of resources. There are ways to mitigate these or rather reduce the risk for something like this from happening. These will be covered on the coming blogs.

b. Shortage or running out of resources

Shortage or running out of business resources could be the result of any of the following;

CASH FLOW AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

You could be mismanaging funds or putting your resources on things that are not producing value to your business, or you’re maybe paying too much for something that you could find at a lessor price. In that case, you need to do your research and see if you cannot get something that provides the same value or more at a lessor price.

As an entrepreneur or businessman, it is important to know your finances and keep on checking your books. Look if there are any leaks and where that leaks are and see if you cannot do something about it. If the funds are going to the right places, then it might be time to seek additional finance from your banker, investor, lenders or other financial institutes. Or consider liquidating some of the assets that you may not need any more or may not be that important in your business.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

One other thing that is important is having proper controls and inventory management systems in place to run your business efficiently and also being able to account for it. Having inventory at the right place, at the right time and in the right quantity is critical as this can directly affect your sales and help you manage risks.

c. Keeping the business culture intact

It can be quite challenging to keep the culture of your business intact. A lot of businesses tend to lose their culture as they grow and this can be fatal in future. Business culture is one of the differentiating factors and the one that tends to keep loyal customers and employees and that is why it is important. This can also help when the business experiences challenges in future, keeping the culture alive can help the business survive during hard times.

d. Balancing quality and growth

The simplest way of talking about this in one sentence and depending on how aggressive you are, “don’t grow to quickly but don’t be slow to adapt”. To expand more on this, you shouldn’t grow too quickly that your business is unable to handle the growth, and don’t lose the essence of your business, the quality that defines your product or service.

External challenges/factors

External challenges or factors are those that the company or organisation don't have control over. These factors can be divided into two; (1) those that the organisation does not have control over but can have influence on, market challenges, and (2) those that the organisation does not have any control over, nor any influence on which is the Macro factors. The organisation must adapt in order to survive.

2. MARKET RELATED CHALLENGES

a. Consumer behaviour towards your product or service

Your product or services may not be received as you hoped it would be by the consumer. You may need to do some investigation to find out why that is the case. There are many reasons why the product or services may not be received well by consumer; it could be the wrong market, your pricing, product flaws or even the attitude of people who are delivering that product or service and many more.

The opposite is true, if you find that people are flocking to your product, it could be that you’re shooting at yourself, maybe through under-pricing or attracting the wrong crowd, and many other things. On the Brightside, you could be offering a brilliant product or selling a great business model. However, it is still important to evaluate business time and time again and make sure you have proper mechanisms to absorb the growth.

b. Consumer behaviour in the market due to economic challenges

These challenges are not directly necessary related to your product but to what is happening in the economy that affect their demand or forces them to prioritise their needs and wants and that may result in people not buying your product as often. You need to be aware of this and be able to adjust to customer needs.

c. Increasing competition

When a business is growing well it might attract competition. It is important that you are aware of that competition and make sure you’re not taken out by the competitors. It is important to stay up to date with trends and emerging technology or innovation in your industry.

d. Copycats

One thing to lookout for is copycats, especially if you’re building a great brand. When a business is successful it tends to attract what is referred to as “business copycats or copycat entrepreneurs”, this is when another business, brand or entrepreneur tries to mimic or imitate the success or use the formula of another business for their own. Often a cheap imitation of product that has been designed, branded or packaged to look like that of another established or a growing brand.

One of the many ways to combat this is to deliberately differentiate your brand from that of the rest or provide solutions that are hard to be copied. Ensure that the consumer can spot the difference from that of competitors.

3. MACRO RELATED CHALLENGES

These factors are the main drivers of the general economy the organisation does not have any control over and any business is confined to. So as mentioned, the best thing to do as a business is to adapt to it.

a. Political and legal factors

Laws and government shape how a company or business can operate and even have some influence on the market sentiment. The business must understand the laws and regulations that dictate both industry it operates in and the laws it may be subjected to. Companies must submit to those laws in order to avoid problems in future.

This includes compliance by the company, taxes imposed on them, and even dealing with employees’ rights such as joining unions, labour laws and other laws that govern areas in which the business operates.

b. Economic factors

Economic factors relate to forces that affect how consumers spend and their purchasing power. Those metrics includes; GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and growth rate, unemployment rates, inflation, disposable income and buying patterns of consumers.

Other factors include economic growth, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, taxes, and the financial market.

c. Socio-cultural factors and social issues where the business operates or employ

This is more related to the populations and how they behave based on their needs, values and preferences. It is important to understand the core values and preferences the characterises those societies and cultural group that live on the area your business operates or targets.

d. Technological innovation and challenges

Technological factors refer to the creation of new technology and how they shape service delivery or product, product development, and access to new market opportunities. Technology is forever growing especially nowadays where it is growing exponential and new innovations are introduced daily.

In this case, it is important to keep up to date with evolving technology especially those in your industry or that can disrupt it. One of the things you can do as a business is understand your customer needs very well and what they want before they even ask for it or listen when they speak. Or for your business to always innovate and adopt technologies that can be beneficiary for you as a business as well as your customer or client base.

e. Environmental factors

It is important to understand that every business affects the environment in which they operate whether positive or negative. Poor caring of the environment has led to what we know now as climate change. Other factors of environment are natural disasters. It is also important to understand what environmental factors may take place in the area your business operates or it has a history in. These unforeseen events can destroy or have a major impact on your business. For example, during the 12 months period between 2021 and 2022, the poultry industry sector was forced to cull over three million birds after 145 bird flu outbreaks were recorded. Cull means to reduce the population of (an animal) by selective slaughter.

One thing you can do to mitigate the risk is to have insurance for your business and/or have measures in place for when unforeseen events happen.

Track Progress

Next, you have to track the overall progress of the business and its strategies by using relevant business metrics. Measuring performance, key performance indicators, is a vital part of monitoring the growth and progress of any business. As already mentioned, you need to describe your business growth strategy and measure your KPIs.

Examples of KPIs you can measure;

Financial performance

Business cash flow, working capital, cost base and growth.

Key financial ratios are;

• Efficiency ratio
• sales growth
• liquidity ratios
• financial leverage

Profitability

• Operating margin
• Gross profit margin
• Net profit margin
• Customer loyalty and retention

To capture customer feedback, you can use sales data, complaint forms, questionnaires and social media.

Employee performance

The most commonly-used metrics to measure employee performance from a financial perspective is sales per employee, contribution per employee and profit per employee.

Many more can be measured depending on the size of your business your business objectives. This may seem quite a lot of work to do but, there are various tools that you can use to measure your business such as Google analytics, social media scheduling tools and accounting software. You can also work with us to help you identify the right tools to use for your business to keep track and measure your business growth.

By working closely with our consultants, we can help you come up with solutions to track your business growth regardless of which business you’re in. If you have any query, you can email us on email, contact us on WhatsApp here if you’re reading it from your mobile phone, or go here to fill in the form below. Or, you can also check out the solutions that is already available by clicking on the link below and register for free.

Competitor analysis

SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunity and threat); ask who your competitors are, what they offer, how they price their products and services, what are their competitive advantages.