“Your systems and process dictate your potential and speed.” - Phil Symchych

The Four Ways To Grow Your Business - Part One

Every entrepreneur wants to grow his or her business.

It’s in their DNA.

Just like a tree wants to grow and spread its branches, an entrepreneur wants to grow, serve more customers and make more money, hopefully with less stress.

Figure 1: The trees surrounding "Poet's Corner" cottage

Did you know that all paths to growth and new revenue are not the same?

Depending on your business situation, some methods might be great and others might waste your time and money. But how do you know which will work?

There’s trial and error.

How much are you willing to spend/invest/lose to learn by trial and error?

There’s just spending the budget.

How long until the marketing money runs out?

Still unsure?

What if there was a better way?

In this article, I’ll describe the four ways to grow your business and the best method to start now.

Today.

After you’ve read this article.

So, what makes me an expert?

My analysis and recommendations on how to grow your business are based on more than three decades of consulting to growth-oriented businesses in 64 industry segments.

I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t, and when, why and how to get results.

Let’s get started.

The four ways to grow your business are:

1.    CUSTOMERS: Increase the number of customers – of the type you want. (The last part is very important.)

 2.    FREQUENCY: Increase the transaction frequency – how often they buy from you.

 3.    VALUE: Increase the average transaction value – how much they spend with you.

 4.    SYSTEMS: Improve your systems and business processes – so you get better at attracting and serving your customers while improving financial results.

Figure 1: The Four Ways To Grow Your Business

These methods are listed from easiest and fastest to implement (advertising to increase the number of customers) to the more complex and time-consuming to implement (improving your systems).

Advertising to increase the number of customers is the easiest. It’s also the most expensive in the short-term and can yield unpredictable (or nil) results.

Improving your systems can take a long time. But, when approached strategically, can offer superior results and an excellent return on investment that will benefit your entire business, your customers and your wealth.

Those improvements carry on into the future.

Since we want to help you grow your business the right way, let’s tackle these items in the optimal order that drives profitable growth, enhances your company valuation (what it’s worth if you sold it), and makes your life as a business owner better.

Today, we’ll start with your internal systems. We’ll discuss the other methods in future articles.

Let’s go!

Improving Internal Systems and Business Processes

Everyone can do this.

Every client I’ve worked with has experienced an improvement in their internal systems and process.

Email Templates

Yesterday, I was on a coaching call with a successful business owner. We were talking about how they manually send the same emails to their new customers requesting information to launch their projects.

This happens multiple times a week.

In your business, this might be happening multiple times a day.

How much time could be saved?

Simply by developing email templates requesting this information, they will save time.

Using software such as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool can help to automate the sequence and sending of the emails, freeing up even more time.

The extra time can be spent on more important tasks such as improving your product line or speaking with new customers and prospects.

Accounting (or any) Departments

One growing business had five people sharing a single user accounting system, taking turns going in and out of the system. Within an hour, they bought a five-user license and we quadrupled the productivity of the accounting department.

How effective are your employees at leveraging technology such as accounting systems, CRMs, or AI, to improve business efficiency and productivity?

Board Reports

For another client, I reduced the monthly Board report from over 80 pages to less than 20 pages, with the most important information highlighted on the first three pages.

That saved the Board time in finding and reading the (three page) highlights, increased their enthusiasm for receiving the (much shorter) report, and helped them focus on the important issues. It saved management time in generating reports.

The three-page highlights got everyone focused on important results and metrics.

Checklists

The simplest system to implement that might be missing in your business is to have employees create checklists for what they do every day. It might be hard for them to think of each step, due to unconscious competence.

They can work in pairs and help each other document their steps or create Loom videos explaining their steps.

I could go on and on. Or, you can read about more success stories in my book, The Business Wealth Builders, available on Amazon here.

There are excellent tools to help you do this. Eli Goldratt’s classic book, The Goal, is an excellent place to start. Value stream mapping is a powerful visual tool that gets people excited about making things better.

If you’d like my help, give me a call or send me an email.

Good luck growing your business.

Full speed ahead!

Phil