How To Grow a Small Business

Introduction.

It has been discovered that most new businesses fail in the first five years of operation, and this has been attributed to many reasons and hidden growth factors.

Anywhere in the world, the failure of most businesses has been attributed to a Lack of startup funds and Building loyal customers.

The factors mentioned above are very accurate but are not severe factors that can pull a business or a start-up to the ground.

In this article, I will be debunking facts that can help you build your newly established business.

Why Should You Start your own Business?

Before we get into deep details, to motivate you a bit, here are a few reasons you should consider starting your business if you have not thought of starting one.

1. You Control Your Destiny

Owning a business saves you from having to work for anyone else. “One reason to own a small business is the ability to direct your company’s culture and, in turn, own your destiny.

When you’re in the driver’s seat, you decide how best to steer your company into the future.

This might be overwhelming for some, and one must know when and how best to delegate.

However, when you can make your own decisions about how best to operate day-to-day, this leads to creating a culture, a brand and an organisation that can unlock doors for your generation and guide you to unlimited wealth.

2. You Choose the People You Work With

When you work for someone else, you rarely get to choose whom you work with.

If you don’t like your co-workers, you’d better start sending our resumes.

That’s not the case when you own your own business since you get to decide who to hire and fire.

You also get the freedom to choose people who are of excellent value to your business growth.

3. You Can Challenge Yourself

As an entrepreneur, you can bet that each day will be filled with new opportunities to challenge yourself, be creative and learn something new.

The great thing about owning a small business is you rarely experience the same day twice.

4. You Can Follow Your Passion

Many entrepreneurs say the long hours they invest in growing their business don’t feel like work because they’re having fun in what they’re doing. And this is a significant ingredient for the success of any business.

5. You get to take all the profit home.

One of the benefits you get from starting your business is taking all the profit home; though it sounds straightforward, a lot of hard work should be put in place in the long run.

As the owner of a business, you have no company deciding who controls your business’s finances because that sole responsibility falls on you.

How To Grow a Small Business.

Do you intend to start a new business? Are you afraid of starting small? here are very few guidelines to keep you going

1. Get to know your customers.

The first step to growing a small business is to get to know your customers. There’s a famous saying in business that states,

customers are always right.

Getting to know and understand your customers can have a massive say in the success of your business.

You can only develop products and services that would significantly impact if only you understand your customers well.

It would help if you also made it a point of duty to seek their opinions always to be able to improve your existing product and outshine competitors.

2. Offer excellent customer service.

Now that your business already has a few customers, the next step would be to offer excellent customer service.

Have you ever wondered why top brands like Samsung still stay in the market and have no competition? The answer lies in excellent customer service.

While working as a customer agent at Samsung Nigeria a few years ago, I usually wondered what kept the customers rushing to our office to purchase new items and maintain the old ones. One of the answers I got from their engineers was the effectiveness of their customer service.

There’s so much customer service support offered after purchasing a product from Samsung than any other brand.

There are so many brands of smartphones out there; even when the Apple IOS pose as a significant competitor, Samsung still stands out when it comes to choosing a brand, and the reason lies in the fact that Samsung offers better customer service support, I don’t know how Apple operates in the United States, but right here in Africa and other parts of the world, I think Samsung has it all.

Woking on after purchase and follow up can do your business a lot of good; make sure your business has a clear customer follow-up and support strategy.

3. Nurture existing customers.

There are so many competitors to your existing business, and they are all out for your customers; you should make sure your current customers become loyal to your brand.

Creating loyal customers can be very hard and time-consuming because they already had an existing brand on their faces just before launching your business. However, one strategy that works very well is offering discounts and coupons and ensuring that your delivery and services are top-notch.

4. Leverage other marketing opportunities.

Every new business should learn to explore as many marketing opportunities as possible; this can help gain more loyal customers. This blog covers the digital aspect of marketing. This is more reason I recommend every business owner to make sure they carefully immerse themselves in the articles on this blog. There are so many marketing opportunities out there, and very few of them include Email marketing, Search engine optimisation, and social media use.

1. Setup a Blog for Business.

Blogging is an avenue that allows you to optimise your business for search engine optimisation to attract loyal customers worldwide.

Blogging aims to continually add value by publishing informative, well-written articles created with strategy and customer engagement in mind.

Starting a blog alongside your business can tell your audience what you can do as a business.
A blog can act as an ongoing portfolio of past work for many businesses, such as personal trainers, home contractors, landscapers, web designers, etc.
This is ideal for companies that thrive on proof of past successes, such as the businesses listed above.
It’s essential to have an easy way to show potential clients what kinds of results they can expect.

With a blog and a few attractive photos of your work, you can easily create an impressive portfolio and drive your customers there.

While it may take more effort to update your whole site, depending on how it was created, blogs on content management systems such as WordPress are generally easy to update, even if you don’t have a lot of technical knowledge.

Another advantage of blogging is the fact that it helps you develop trust. Your brand will become when you grow precious content that continually adds value to your readers.

Trust is not quickly secured, but once a reader finds a blog flowing with a constant value, they will naturally trust that business.

And eventually, this will lead to them becoming a customer – likely a lifetime one, all based on a flow of valuable content. I wrote a comprehensive guide on starting a blog; click the link below to get started.

How To Start a Blog And Make Money

Here are very few articles I recommend you read to help you get started.

5. Give back to your community.

Most businesses are just particular about making money, and this is one major cause of their failures; you must ensure your business exists for more than just making money.

People want to feel emotionally connected to the companies they do business with. So make sure that your business supports a cause and make it part of your company’s mission.

Reasons Why So Many Businesses Fail

It has been discovered that many business owners were incredible at what they did before starting their businesses. For example, The hairstylist who opens a salon, The web designer who designs a website for clients and the mechanic that opens a shop.

You have very few going on in your life at this level, referring to Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow quadrant below.

Referring to the image above, we see that the individuals mentioned above are in the self-employment quadrant, meaning they are employees in their profession; there is no real difference between the native team member and you being self-employed because they are placed in the same quadrant. Moving to the business owner and investment quadrant.

This post will guide you through three critical tips to figuring out what might be blocking your business from success.

1. Poor or No Feedback Medium.

Feedback’s information about reactions to a product, a person’s performance of a task, etc., which is used as a basis for improvement.

Feedback can be in the form of complaints.
custom form or box or feedback

The first tip in figuring out why your business isn’t taking off is figuring out what’s missing, and one way to know this is by creating an effective feedback medium.

When your business lacks adequate or no feedback, it is a sure sign that your customers are going somewhere else to get the kind of service they need, and your business is slowly dying and may come down crashing all of a sudden.

In conclusion, The best approach to Generate customers feedback is listed below.

Create a custom online form attached to your website.
Create a feedback box in your office for complaints.
Use Polls.
Monitor Social Channels.
Call your customers regularly.
Provide live chat support.
Create an online community

This forces you to break everything down to the most basic form and for you to see exactly what roles you are and are not filling in your business. You’ll be amazed at how quickly the holes start to appear.

2. Inadequate or No Systems.

Systems allow you to perform and schedule various business tasks effectively. Designs can be in multiple forms, and some of them are.

System for leads generation.
Systems for sales and delivery
Payment collection.

Most new business owners piece together tasks as they come up throughout the day, week, month, and year. And this works in the beginning, for the most part.

Then your business starts to grow, and you still don’t have any straightforward process or system to make sure your operation is running smoothly. This becomes a significant drain on energy and resources because nothing is repeatable or scalable.

One of the most critical aspects of building a business is to make sure you have essential systems in place that are required.

It may feel like you have no time to sit down and figure this out, but this is exactly what you need to reclaim your time and focus on growing your business instead of feeling like you have to constantly have your hand on everything to prevent it from falling apart.

3. Technician Or Entrepreneur, where do you belong?

This last tip is a significant mindset shift you have to make to succeed in business. It would help if you shifted from being a technician to being an entrepreneur and business owner.

Being an excellent technician means you have mastered particular skills needed to succeed in your industry – so,

A hairstylist is skilled as a hairstylist
A mechanic is experienced as a mechanic.
A chiropractor is skilled as a chiropractor.

This is wonderful and will help you rise to the top of your field and be successful. So it feels natural that you would be skilled as a business owner in that same industry, right? You have not intentionally changed your mindset to step into your new role as an entrepreneur.

Some of your technical skills might translate to building a successful business, and your industry knowledge can give you an upper hand. Still, you must dedicate time, resources, and energy to building skills and expertise as an entrepreneur. For you to successfully do this, you need a shift of mindset.

Conclusion

Growing a small business can be a very stressful task, and most times, you don’t usually see the end from the beginning, but it is up to you to take up the challenge. Here is an article I recommend you read just in case you find the problem with competition.

How To Beat Competitors In Business

Final words.

Dear reader, I want you to know that we are predestined to meet in this world but maybe not physically; I am so glad that we could meet on this platform today.

I want you to know that I value relationships and friendship, and I want to get to know you more, connect and express feelings towards each other.

I am appealing that you drop your email in the email subscription box below; you never can tell we might have solutions to the problem each other and even help ourselves from there.

You never can tell; great relationships start from somewhere, don’t forget to drop your email.

You can as well connect with me on social media platforms like
Twitter.com/_udemezue

See you in the Next email.