3 Ways to Grow Your Business
Despite the tactics you use to grow your business, it comes down to one of 3 things. If you keep your focus on these three, you can gain clarity, and gauge activities that you're doing against whether or not they move you closer to growth or further from it.
The following 3 areas are the areas of focus that I use with my clients, when helping them grow their business.
Get More Customers
In reality, you should be focusing on getting more clients, not just customers. What's the difference? Customers are people who pay you once for a product or service, clients are those that you have an ongoing relationship with. This could be via your email list, on the phone, in person, or networking.
In a future article I will go into the math of what a seemingly small increase can do for your business. Prospecting (client acquisition) is expensive. So, you want to identify ways to reduce the cost of client acquisition. Whether that is strictly time and energy, or it's advertising dollars spent.
If you increase the effectiveness that you're able to move someone into a prospect, and then eventually to a customer/client... You will increase your bottom line. Period. If you want me to cover techniques to do this in more detail via an article or video, let me know in the comments.
Get More Transactions
Getting more transactions (or sales) per client is another of the three focuses. What if you were able to make an additional sale to even half (or a quarter) of your client base what that would do for your business?
This can happen in the form of up-sells, down-sells, cross-sells, affiliate sales, follow-up offers, or recurring plans or membership.
“But, what if your business doesn’t have repeat transactions?”
If you're a wedding planner/photographer, real estate agent, or similar this could seem impossible right? Well, if that's the case you have to think about transactions per client a little differently. In this case it would be changed to "referrals per client". With that in mind, it should still be a main focus of your business.
Also, find something else to offer your clients. Could you offer a deluxe package? How about partnering with businesses that have a similar client base and giving referrals for a small fee from the sale? If you're a carpet cleaner, could you sell a spot cleaning cleaner that they can buy from you?
What about recurring plans or membership? Could you offer services on an ongoing basis, even if it was for a discounted rate? If we go back to the carpet cleaning example, could you offer a monthly plan that gets them a 25% discount on carpet cleaning and you come and clean their carpets once a month like clock work?
What would recurring revenue do to your business?
Get More Value Per Transaction
This one is quite possibly the easiest way to grow your business and increase profitability. All it takes is believing that you can charge more for your products and services. There are a couple of caveats here.
The first, is that obviously if you're going to do this you need to be offering quality. Whether that's your product or service, doesn't matter. If you're offering high quality, you'll easily be able to increase your value per transaction. If you're not offering value, you will not be successful long term.
That being said, let's assume that your product/service is currently $100. Could you charge $110 for the same thing? What could you add that wouldn't be a huge impact on you, but would increase the value your customers get in effort to "justify" your raised prices? Many business owners don't charge more because they don't believe they can. It's a mental thing, and a challenging one.
What to do next...
Think of 3 ways that you could increase each of the three areas above. Then, write them down! Could you focus on one of the above areas each week? What would that do to your business?
