How to Effectively Grow a Small Business

In this blog post we’re going to make a number of suggestions on how new start ups along with small businesses in general can grow their businesses even if they don’t have a Fortune 500 company budget. Growing a small business isn’t easy, particularly if you don’t have many resources. But we’re going to give you simple ways to solve this issue. Here we go.

Understand what your customers want. It is vitally important for any business, but particularly a start up, to understand the demands of the market and what their customers want. Try and use feedback devices and surveys to find out the needs of your customers and let this guide you towards developing your products and services accordingly.

Develop exceptional customer service skills. Pay attention to detail when it comes to how your business interacts with your customers and clients. Along with having an amazing product or service that your customers love, pay attention to how your staff interact with your customers, both on the phone and in person. Be mindful of follow up care and your returns policy or a guarantee if you have one. Let every part of interacting with your company be easy and hassle free which will lead to the next point.

Build loyalty. Everyone wants repeat business and it is often more expensive to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one. With this in mind invest (time or money) in keeping your current customers enthused about your business. Build a fence around them so other businesses can’t come along and poach them. Some ways to do this are loyalty schemes and offering your current customers advanced access to any new products or services you come up with. If your budget allows then customer appreciation events/parties always go down well.

Build a brand or a name. This is generally the territory of the big corporate company but even small companies can build brands and reputations even if it’s just in a small town or neighbourhood. Make efforts to get people to recognise your company as the best in class and you will reap the benefits of this over the long run. Aside from providing a great product and amazing customer service try and get positive coverage for your company from your local media. This isn’t always easy but can certainly pay dividends if you can pull it off.

Build a high quality team. Investing in your staff is vitally important for any business even if you are the only staff. Keeping up to date with the latest changes in your industry or improving customer service skills are very important and feed back into the earlier points of understanding your customer’s needs and also building loyalty.

Attend local networking events. Every town in the land has local business networking events. These can be large and more formal events like those provided by organisations like Business Networking International (BNI) and Business Biscotti or they could be smaller more informal events held at co-working spaces or in local cafes.

And finally, continually analyse and refine your processes. Measure and observe what works and throw out what doesn’t. This will mean you are becoming more effective and your business will grow. Constant refinement will ensure that you never get complacent and new customers will be much easier to attract.

So there you have it, some simple tips to help grow any small business. Pick a few of these ideas and try them this month and watch your business start to grow.