Statistically, only 2 of 5 startups bring profit and have chances to grow, while others become loss-making. Founders whose first ventures failed, usually, achieve 20% higher business outcomes than those who were not pushed out of the game on the first try. Failures made business leaders rethink how to grow a business and transform their small spark of an idea into a blazing success. Want to know their conclusions?
We’re about to share the proven roadmap. By sticking to it, one can turn a seed-stage startup into an industry giant.
Step #1. Master Your Niche
To thrive in the business jungle, you must become the king of your niche. It reminds us of a lion mastering its hunting ground by observing first and practicing next.
Ask yourself:
- What is the current state and the future trends of the industry?
- Are there any regulatory changes affecting the niche?
- Who are the primary customers in this niche?
- What are their needs and pain points?
- How does the target audience make decisions?
- What are the main strengths and weaknesses of your competitors in this niche?
- What unique value does your product or service offer?
- What are the typical pricing models in this niche?
Find the precise answers and adjust all your actions to them. It’s absolutely possible to open a small flower shop ignoring fire safety rules, but your government will give you a fine later. The same with sticking to brand positioning rules. You may ignore this step, yet it will catch you up later.
Step #2. Roar Your Unique Voice
Your marketing should be your mighty roar, heard far and wide. Consider investing in digital marketing as it can extend your target audience globally and simply because people spend long hours on the web nowadays, sacrificing offline leisure.
Be unique and bold when it comes to your SEO or SMM strategies. We guess that some of your competitors know how to grow a business, yet it doesn’t mean that their approaches will work for the second time. Find out what they cannot offer to their customers, but you can. Try new media formats that were not widely utilized within your niche.
Step #3. Build Pride of Exceptional Talent
In most cases, you need to assemble a professional team to ensure your business’s success. Ideally, if you have a clear understanding of:
- Needed team roles and duties;
- Current situation on the relevant niche of the talent market.
This will increase your chances of crafting a productive hiring strategy.
When comparing candidates, take into account their soft skills. Are your potential team members roaring in unison? It’s important not only to find people with matching experience and rates but also those who are ready for intense teamwork and will do their best to keep your venture on track.
One of the time- and energy-saving tips for growing business success is delegating certain business ops to third parties. Nowadays, business owners typically weigh outstaffing vs. outsourcing when need extra hands to cope with their project tasks. These models offer different levels of control. Outsourcing comes with its ready-made management and tech team. Outstaffing includes a tailored search of specialists who can fill a project’s skill gaps and hiring them by an outstaffing firm, while business owners directly manage those specialists. Keep in mind both options to prevent your team’s burnout.
Step #4. Seize Opportunities
Opportunities can vanish into the air fast. To catch them, keep your eyes peeled and ears sharp. Growing companies may resort to such effective maneuvers as:
- Form partnerships to gain access to a wider customer pool and optimize costs;
- Search for experienced advisors who can help with mentorship, networking with investors, and strategic planning;
- Join startup incubators or similar projects which, like advisors, can provide business ventures with necessary guidance and budgeting sources;
- Explore niche markets or unique product offerings to develop in a low-competitive environment.
Step #5. Adapt to Change
Dinosaurs couldn’t adapt, and look where they ended up. Want to know how to grow business stability? It’s a bit paradoxical, but a stable business is a flexible business. Don’t be a business dinosaur, be a business chameleon, changing colors with the market to survive.
Among the must-haves of adaptability, we’d name:
- Improving the usability of your web solutions;
- Establishing a presence at popular communication platforms from Ticktock to Discord;
- Leveraging AI tools for customer experience, data-driven hiring, and business analytics.
Step #6. Search for Innovation
How to grow business value, which can set you apart from the pack? Stay innovative. To climb higher in the business food chain, it’s possible to:
- Make your products or services more planet-friendly by reducing office space and using cloud technologies rather than on-premises;
- Provide learning programs and tools that help your customers get most of your products and services (like Google Courses, which initially were created to support Google Ads users);
- Launch new products or services (ideally, if they form a single ecosystem with your existing products and services, like all the devices from Apple).
Step #7. Nurture Customer Relationships
Frankly, we don’t know how to grow a business without nurturing customer relationships.
To build trust with your customers:
- Answer their calls promptly;
- Solve their problems effectively;
- Keep all the interactions with them in a smart system aka CRM;
- Personalize their experiences in all possible ways, including employing AI assistants, which can be programmed to keep all the details of the previous conversations;
- Combine virtual assistants with human support agents, as, currently, AI can be clumsy, annoying, and insecure.
Soon, you’ll have a crowd of your brand advocates. Thus, positive word-of-mouth will attract new customers on the thumb.
It is All About How to Grow a Business Mindset
If to sum up, the only irreplaceable thing in your business survival and boosting toolkit is your business mindset. In other words, it is your proactive attitude that allows you to master your niche, let your marketing roar, build a roaring team, seize opportunities, adapt to change, innovate like never before, and nurture customer relationships. With these strategies, your business is becoming the ruler, the tend-setter, rather than an average applicant in the long line for a place in the sun.
