Organic Growth Strategies – 4 effective strategies you can implement today!
Growing your business is a natural objective for virtually all small businesses. In our last blog about methods to grow your business, we explored “5 Exponential Growth Strategies for SME’s”, looking into ways where immediate growth can be achieved through acquisitions, franchising, distribution expansion, licensing IP and expanding into new geographical areas.
Today, we take a look at the more organic growth methods; still very effective and still with the purpose of growing your business to achieve scalability, which in turn gives you greater critical mass to employ specialised skills (with the aim to remove dependency on you the business owner in selected functional areas of the business) and ensuring that you are building an asset with a higher probability that it will be a more attractive sale proposition for when you choose to exit.
Here are some key strategies to consider:
- Product Expansion – where you have a defined target market who value your product or service and are generally brand loyal, then it suffices that there is significant trust in your brand. Where that trust exists the introduction of new products, especially where they can be “bundled” with your existing offerings, can allow you to increase the average spend per sale with very little increase in marketing and sales costs. Where you have a captured audience, ask yourself if there are synergistic products or services with opportunities that can add new revenue streams to your business?
- Grow from current client base – if you have repeat and regular purchasing clients then you really are doing something right. In fact, I would go as far as saying that you are satisfying and solving peoples “problems” and doing it well. The interesting thing is this; if you are solving people’s problems, how many of those clients probably know others with the same problem? The key question is “are you asking them if they know others who experience the same problem as they did” ……….. before you solved it for them? You will find that most people are more than happy to be helping those close to them solve a similar problem; simply ………………. ask!
- Steal Competitors Clients – “steal”; such a harsh word. Business is about competition so if it makes you feel better, we can use the phrase “acquire competitor’s clients”. It’s amazing how many people use a competitor because that’s who they’ve been using for years. However, if you know you have a compelling offer and strong point of difference wouldn’t it make sense to target your competitor’s clients who are not receiving the service, pricing, value adding or quality that you can provide?
- Aggressive Marketing – many small businesses have grown organically; that is, from great service, awesome product, reliability and other elements, from time to time a new client appears because they have been informed of how brilliant you are from a friend. But do you know “why” people come to you over your competitors? If you do and there is an outstanding and compelling reason why your customers LOVE you, then shout it from the rooftop! Seek help if necessary to clearly articulate your competitive advantage and speak to expert marketers who have the skill to be very succinct in communicating these key trigger words; build “buyer persona’s” that identify their demographics and psychographics of why they love you and develop marketing strategies that maximise the specific message that grabs the attention and appeals to these specific buyers.
Whether you are aggressive and wish to grow exponentially or feel more comfortable taking the organic approach to increase your revenue, the key trick to all this is to ensure that you challenge the norm of how you are doing business today. And that means, taking time out and involving your people to ask yourselves the questions about which growth strategy is right for you. In most cases, it will be a combination of multiple strategies, therefore conducting a strategy workshop to uncover the opportunities and what works for you best is a very effective method of mapping out your growth strategies.
And as we have stated as a clear strategy above; Advivo would like to ask you …… do you need help? Certainly feel free to contact us and discuss your needs where our Corporate Advisory team will extend that helping hand. Contact us on 07 3226 1800 or through our Contact Form.
Written by: Trevor Holmes
