When I work with consultancy clients, my initial focus is on putting in place small business growth strategies, a plan of action that will act as our North Star as we work together growing the business. My goal is to help the business owner to think strategically first and tactically second, so the strategy drives the daily tactical execution.

The reason I approach business growth in this way, is that it overcomes the overwhelm that many small business owners feel, gives them clarity each day on the most important tasks they need to focus on and metrics to measure the progress they are making with their business growth. I truly believe that with a structured growth strategy in place, business growth is predictable and planned, not something that relies on luck or finding the right “tactic”. If you want to download a step by step guide to creating a Remarkable Growth Strategy you can download my guide here – The Remarkable Business Growth Strategy

Focus On These 12 Elements In Your Small Business Growth Strategies

As a starting point for your small business growth strategies I recommend focusing on the following 12 elements, these will give a structured approach to how you grow, clarity on where to spend your time and also allow you to revise and improve your strategy year on year, as you have data to replace opinion on what is working. Remember, this is all about planning, executing, measuring and optimising in a structured manner.

• Goals & Objectives – Your starting point has to be in setting specific goals for growth, these will usually be dictated by the revenue growth you want to achieve and then reverse engineer from there.
• Targeting – I talk a lot about the power of being a specialist and not a generalist and this is where you will identify your target market, the companies in that market and the people within those companies that you need to be talking to. If you run a business to consumer (B2C) business, then your targeting will be on your dream customer and understanding them.
• Business Positioning – Now you know who you are targeting, you must position your business and your offerings correctly in front of them. Developing a strong business position will allow you differentiate your business, who you help, how you help them and why you do it better than anyone else. This step is critical in attracting “good fit” prospects to your business, so all your time is spent talking to people who you know you can help.
• Market Place & Competitor Analysis – At this point in developing your growth strategy, take the time to go deep on your market place, audit how your competitors are connecting and engaging with your target audience. I recommend taking the two market leaders, the big players in your market, a couple of mid-sized competitors and a local competitor, as a cross section of 5 competitors. Then visit their website, examine their blog, visit their social media and make notes on what they do well and any gaps you can see that you could exploit.
• Your Product Ecosystem – Your business will probably have core products and services that you offer to customers, but the secret to earning attention, connecting and engaging correctly with your audience is in developing a product ecosystem of free products, products for prospects, core products and products for customers. I talk more about this here – Developing Your Small Business Growth Strategy

• Your Sales Plan – Your growth will revolve around your sales process, filling a sales pipeline and your achievement of your sales goals. So take the time to map them out, what sales do you need to generate, how many of each product or service do you need to sell, how many leads do you need to generate, from what lead sources and this will dictate your marketing plan and marketing activity, which is why I recommend you focus on this first.
• Your Marketing Plan – Marketing is all about being effective in generating leads for your business. Focus on 5 – 6 traffic sources and lead sources, map out your marketing campaigns, what your website needs to look like to convert visitors into leads, how you are going to develop your content strategy, how you will use social media and how you will scale your lead generation with paid advertising.
• Your Talent & Recruitment Plan – You can’t do this on your own, you need a team of A-players around you to free you to work on the high-value strategic work in the business and ensure that they are responsible for the key areas of the business such as sales, marketing, operational delivery, finance and customer success. So map out the roles you will need to fill, write a job description and profile the type of person you need in each position.
• Your Operational Delivery – This is what you are known for and you need to make your operational delivery remarkable, so you delight your customers and leave them wanting more of what you do, as well as telling people about you. Focus on your processes for delivery, develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) and standardise everything you do, to ensure a consistent experience from your customers.
• Your Service & Support – Now map out your customer support processes, this is critical as delighted customers will help you improve your service, by completing surveys, leaving reviews, creating testimonials, be happy to be a case study, refer other people and of course buy more from your business.
• Business Systems & Technology – How are you leveraging technology to grow? Have you built a single source of truth for your business, a connected system of tools, apps and software that is easy to use and allows you to make data driven decisions. Are you embracing A.I for your business or are you burying your head in the sand hoping it will go away, while your competitors leverage technology to grow? Map out the technology you need and how you can connect everything into a central system, usually built around your CRM. I use Leadnamic for my system, as this allows everything to connected in one place.
• Metrics, Reporting & Dashboards – Finally I want you to think through what metrics you have for each part of your strategy and what dashboards you need to create, with what reports being generated? What we can measure, we can improve, so this is a critical part of your strategy.

So over to you, above you have the blueprint for a small business growth strategy that will take you wherever you want to take your business. Now you need to spend the time pulling this together. I recommend taking around 12 weeks, with a week focused on each of the above sections, so you create an effective growth strategy that you can return to year after year.