When it comes to growing your existing business, you need to know yourself and your team. What are your strong and weak areas? Sell your strong points, and consider outsourcing or having someone else take care of the tasks you don't specialize in. Ask yourself where you are most effective, that is where you will be most valuable to your company.
Goal setting must be clear. Without a "destination" your organization will keep spinning its wheels. Set goals, measure your success and reach your destination. When we measure our performance, we are more likely to achieve our goals.
The age old question "What comes first? We want to grow, do we hire resources and buy equipment or do we sell first?" The safe answer (if you can manage this) is: sell first then add overhead. Don't forget to sell to your existing customers, it requires less effort to sell to an existing client than market to a new client and hope to get a sale. It is still important to prospect for new clients, without new clients you may not experience the growth results you expect.
As your business grows, your people should too. Are they able to take on more responsibility? Do they have all the tools necessary to follow you to the next level? Ensure that your company culture is strong, and reflects everything you want it to. Your staff needs to feel a sense of belonging and appreciation in order to be productive.
Company Culture Check
As a business owner, you want to get the most out of your business. Some best practices to improve the performance of your business are outlined below.
Create a strong company culture: In successful companies, performance is part of the culture from top to bottom. Ensure that performance expectations are clear and reinforced by recognition. A positive work environment creates motivation; motivated staff will produce higher results.
Define objectives, and empower people to do the job: This practice sounds simple but is sometimes challenging. The job of leadership is to establish the goals, motivate people and give ownership to those who have to live with the outcome. Empowering people will ensure buy-in.
Focus on staff effectiveness: Determine if competencies of your people fit your strategy. Performance improvement requires you to examine whether you are getting the most out of your people and optimizing competencies and motivation.
Manage communication effectively: Change management requires two-way communication at all levels of your company. The communication battle is generally won "in the trenches," in one-on-one interactions between employees and their immediate managers. This entails managing the process from the top down to ensure honesty and consistency of message, even when the news is bad.
Focus on revenue generation and innovation as well as cost: Most successful companies manage intensively and are constantly renewing their revenue-generating processes, including customer relationship management, selling and sales management and customer service.
At the Leeds and Grenville Small Business Enterprise Centre, we can answer questions you may have about growing your business:
- Human resources
- Writing proposals
- Import / export
- Financing for growth
- Target and Niche Markets
- Networking and growing my contact base
- Promoting my business
- Recognizing signs of problem areas
- How to manage growth
- Succession planning for growth (retirement, sale or takeovers, etc)
- business consulting
- follow up mentoring
- business plan assistance
- financial documentation
"I think that our fundamental belief is that for us growth is a way of life and we have to grow at all times." - Mukesh Ambani
