Business Growth
Once your business is established and is generating cashflow, it’s important to have a plan in place to create and manage growth. Ideally, you will have structured your business and crafted your business
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Assess and mitigate the various risks your business faces from a legal, finance and marketing perspective.
Improve efficiency and remove any roadblocks in your organisational structure, process, systems and workflow.
Audit your finances to identify leakages, cost saving opportunities and new revenue streams.
Assess the market-fit of your product or service against your competitors and the supply demand to see where your business sits.
Review where your business currently is and develop a plan of action to achieve your long-term business goals.
Plan how your business can prepare for and continue to operate after a serious incident or crisis.
Unlock your potential to help you grow your business
Maximise your time management and increase productivity levels across your whole business.
Find out how healthy your business is. Learn what you’re doing well, what you can improve and whether your business can go the distance.
Unlock your full potential as a business owner to achieve your long-term business goals.
Conduct an audit of your marketing strategies, objectives and campaigns to identify which areas can be improved.
Business coaches can steer your business in the right direction for short and long-term growth.
Produce a viable, strategic and realistic business plan that will set you up for success.
Track, analyse and improve the performance of your process, employees or your entire business.
2020 was a tough year for small businesses. The global pandemic impacted people across the globe and businesses were forced to adapt. One of the main lessons learnt over the past year is the...
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Amanda Hoffmann - Certified Bookkeeper, BAS Agent, Owner / Manager ★ Certified Bookkeeper ★ BAS Agent at My Office Books - Virtual Bookkeeper & BAS Agent
In extension to the statements above, it is very important that the business owner/strategist has a process to measure the success or failure that is accomplished.
A gut feeling is simply not good enough.
Most accounting software has basic methods to assist.
Quickbooks has a Class / Location
Xero has tracking categories
Myob has locations/jobs
Using a client's example:
A beautician has three clinics with 20 packages of services and skincare products
Using Quickbooks as an example she creates three store locations
Ipswich
Moorooka
Chermside
Then the 20 packages are tracked using "class"
She also mapped all her product sales against the appropriate clinic locations.
After three months the beauty salon owner discovered some surprising insights:
Ipswich sold mostly massage/waxing packages and in skincare, acne packages were the most popular
Moorooka did not break even in services or products, it was hemorrhaging losses.
Chermside clients loved the higher end packages and skincare products.
With this information, the beautician closed the Moorooka clinic, as the lease was due to be renewed.
A new product line of aromatherapy essential oils and massage goods were introduced to Ipswich.
The money she saved in rent by closing Moorooka went into more modern laser machinery and expanded the store in Chermside.
Knowledge is power.
Research, customer feedback, advertising/marketing, website SEO, blogging all work together well as long as you have processes in place to document their success or failure.
Hatty Bell , Community Manager at SavvySME
Interesting insight @Amanda Hoffmann - Certified Bookkeeper, BAS Agent . Most companies rely on marketing for this kind of insight so it's interesting to hear that Quickbooks can also offer this too. Knowledge is definitely power!
What do you think of this approach @Jef Lippiatt @Phil Sealy ?
Jef Lippiatt , Owner at Startup Chucktown
I definitely think working from real data is helpful. That can definitely give you insight into locations that are over or under performing. It may even give you insight into products or services that are selling well.
However, this approach does have limitations when used as the only factor. Because it won’t be able to tell you what products or services the customers in that area do want. If you just close the location, you may irritate other customers that really did like that location. Perhaps that location didn’t look to serve the customers specific to that region.
This is why it is important to stay close to the customers and their wants and needs. If you don’t understand your customer it is hard to properly serve them.
Consider using polls and surveys to send to existing customer to ask them what they feel is missing or would like improved. Consider reaching out to the customers that spend the most money their to understand what drives them to that specific location. There are always many factors to consider when thinking about diversifying your products and services, or even your entire business.
Can your business run on autopilot whilst you're away or will it stop running if you're not there?
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Steve Gray, Director at Gray Capital Investments
To me it all starts with an effective strategic plan. Then you have a guideline to follow, if it's in place and working well, you know the things you expect from yourself and others will be in alignment with that. By the time you aim to go away... you know that the strategic plan has proven itself and your people are simply going through exceptional motions to do what they do, if there's a hiccup then it will show up fast and it will be solved. Here's an example.
You are away and an issue comes up witha key supplier, they are contracted to supply an item vital to production, they know you are away, and one of their team let things slide to give them some slack so rush out product for a new client. Your team doesn't know that but they know what to do. They call and chat about the issue, working on your key value of respect, everyone know the organsiations stance on that and follows it, it includes all stakeholders. Before long someone higher up in the organisation spots your team has an issue and knows that they need to take positive action. Hiccup attended to, and pursued until a resolution is achieved. Tey may be able to suply more often but in smaller amounts so you can keep going.
Anyything that happens along the way will be readily dealt with due to the team knowing they need to find effective and elegant answers asap. They have an intimate appreciation of the way things are done and how they can be solved.
Best overall example I saw was a guy and his wife who ran a business, he wanted more time, so he weaned himself off the business a half day at a time, to the staff it looked like he was out chatting with clients. Nope he was having some very well earned ME time. His wife took different times off. After a while they both took off a half week here and there and built up.
Along teh way he and his wife figured out the issues they could deal with from afar and plugged up the holes for any other issues that would come up operationally.
Each business will have differeing needs for what they need to develop for smooth systems, policies and procedures.
Tim Stokes, Managing Director at Profit Transformations
First, clarify your vision of what you're aiming to achieve. Is it 50% growth per year or 500%? Does your business need higher profit margins to solve cash flow challenges or higher revenue?
With a clear vision I then recommend engaging the employees to form a team with weekly meetings to update them on progress towards achieving your vision and goals.
Next, find out your current position and starting point by measuring the 3 areas of a business...
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Once your business is established and is generating cashflow, it’s important to have a plan in place to create and manage growth. Ideally, you will have structured your business and crafted your business processes to make them easily scalable, but if not you will need to explore the most efficient and safe ways to effectively expand your operations. Growth necessarily has two elements; growth in business done and scaling the infrastructure to service that business. In a service business, this will likely mean attracting more clients and adding the necessary staff to deliver your services and manage business operations. In a product business, it will mean making more sales and handling the increased complexity and cost of the logistics to source and distribute them.
Scaling a business without increasing demand is useless and dangerous. It increases the operational costs and overheads, without simultaneously growing the revenue stream. Therefore the first step in expanding a business is to stimulate growth by acquiring new customers and increasing income. These practices fall into two main areas - sales & marketing and business development.
On the sales & marketing side, businesses are looking to attract new customers and clients. This can be done in many different ways, and businesses should be utilising market research to build a marketing strategy that works for them and their key demographics. Further to this, the sales funnel and sales processes should be constantly reviewed and refined to ensure that the highest possible percentage of leads (generated by marketing) are converted to sales. Companies will likely utilise a mix of advertising (both traditional and digital), public relations and direct marketing techniques to generate new leads, so investing greater resources in these avenues will lead to growth - as long as the marketing strategy is effective and the sales funnel has been well constructed.
On the business development side, businesses are looking to eliminate waste and lower their expenses (thereby raising their profits), and adding new income streams. New income streams may come from the development of new products and services, the undertaking of new partnerships or the acquisition of new productive assets.
As far as problems go, a growing business is one of the best ones to have. A growing business is one which is experiencing demand which goes beyond its current capacity to deliver, and which increases its capacity to meet the new demand. It should be noted that this is not the only way to handle excess demand. Some businesses, especially consultancies and other business services, choose instead to raise their fees and become more selective about projects, allowing them to increase their earning and reputation without exposing themselves to higher overheads. Similarly, a company offering a new product who cannot meet excess demand may raise the product price, introduce a waiting list or offer limited special runs, depending on the type of product.
In most cases however, the best way for a business to generate higher profits is for that business to scale with demand. The specific way this is done will differ depending on what it is the business delivers, but it may include investing in increased production facilities or equipment, hiring new staff, developing better customer service tools, upgrading business systems, streamlining existing business processes and simply working longer hours. When the growth is likely to be sustained growth, it is wise for the business to have a scaling plan which allows production capacity to be increased sequentially using a well-defined process, to avoid business disruption and to minimise risk.