Welcome to another year! How to really crack it this time!

I don’t know how many times I’ve said or written that over the years, but it’s probably around 30 times, over the last 30 years in the last couple of businesses I’ve had. The fundamentals that I’ve always talked about in relation to business growth, is to having a strategic plan for the next year, to ensure the business actually gets to where you want it to go and it’s still the same message and still, 80% of businesses won’t do it, (again!)

The solution to business growth and really getting a great result are much simpler and easier than most think and although focusing on the negative of anything most of the time isn’t a great idea, understanding what the problems and missed opportunities are, makes what you need to do, very clear, if you want to do it!

99% of businesses are simple to run, build and grow. Open the doors, know how to attract, sell, service and retain clients, if you have staff train and manage them well, do a little marketing and promotion and layout a strategic plan and manage the process and you’ll get there, but most won’t and don’t! (even with the simplest product or service it’ll work) It’s not about digital, it’s not about price and it’s not about motivation. Get the foundations right and just about any business will work much better.

But if you investigate businesses deeper regarding what’s going on now, you start to understand there is a little more to it as to what holds most businesses back and in fact there are five key areas that continue to get missed with 99% of businesses regardless of small or large, or what they do.

• Business are under skilled. Owners, managers and their teams lack in even the most basic skills to do what they need to do at 100% and don’t get why they need to do what they do anyway, other than it’s their job.
• Business don’t do what they need to do and continue to miss opportunities. You could take just one aspect alone, that would probably double most businesses. Better service, but they don’t. Give a client an experience, rather than just customer service, follow-up fast and any business will grow. (Hey just follow-up!)
• As a business, we focus far too much attention on digital and social media, because businesses are reducing their marketing spend, (to under 1% on average down from 5%) by trying to make “free” social media work. In 99% of cases it doesn’t. Less than 2% of Facebook posts get through to your community and it’s only going to get harder, even if you pay.
• Businesses work towards importing and outsourcing, rather than local manufacture, because they believe it will save them a few cents, but not be aware of the long-term costs. We need to do everything possible to support local manufacturing and local services. Outsourcing has become all too common and yes, local businesses need to get competitive, but outsourcing, manufacturing overseas, continues to reduce our own manufacturing and employment opportunities. Locally sourced supports everyone, local business, local employment and the local economy.
• And government support services have their heads in the sand, what they do doesn’t work, but hey, we’re doing something right? Businesses need to focus attention, skills development and support on what will work, not just on what’s popular.

In order to grow any business this year and throughout the next decade, all any business needs to do is get the fundamentals right.

• Understand what’s possible, by reverse engineering what your business could really do. The maximised potential.
• What’s the objective? Then plan, plus also design the strategies needed to achieve the objective. For example, if you have one salesperson that does 5 sales a week, but you need ten, you simply need two salespeople, better marketing, or a salesperson with better skills or does more!
• Get clear about why someone would buy from you. If there isn’t a wow or standout factor are you just competing with everyone else on price alone? Don’t rely on discounting, daily deals or delivery options to attract customers. They just look for the next deal again and there gone.
• Upskill the team (everyone!) The ability to communicate, sell, service, follow-up and simply articulate what it is you do, is critical. You can easily tell the difference between a business that has service standards as part of its staff training and one that doesn’t.
• You need a strategic plan! What’s the business going to do, how will it do it and the regular management review time frames so you know when it will do it by. Currently less than 17% of businesses do any form of planning, but the real problem is even less than half ever look at it again, once it’s been done. The only way to grow a business without a lot of luck, or spending a small fortune on marketing, is by regularly reviewing a strategic plan and simply asking the question, are we on track and if not why?

Welcome to another year and like most business owners you’ll probably go, this is it, this will be the year it finally takes off and like most it probably won’t, unless you do something different. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

Just about any business could massively grow and even double within the next 12 to 24 months. Get even one fundamental business driver right, and a business will grow, get all of them right and a business could be unstoppable. It’s also about structure, systems and getting a business to a point where the processes and the team, run the business, not just the owner.

So welcome to 2020. It’s much easier to get a business growing and getting the real results you want and more often than not it just takes a little change, a small tweak here and there and your business could be doing 20%, 30%, 50% or double what it did last year. Focus on what you need to do, not on what you don’t.

ThinkBusinessGrowth in 2020. Mybusinessnow, simple, easy, quick uncomplicated business growth.