Those businesses that successfully grow are those that make business growth a key priority. Do you? I usually find that how focused a business owner is on growing their business is dependent on 1 thing…how much money they have in the bank. When you first start up you are totally focused on growing your business as you need clients and invariably don’t have much money in the bank. As you gain new clients and the money starts to come in then your time becomes more taken up with delivering to your client base. This is a completely natural evolution of your business. The point where this becomes counter-productive is when you are so busy running your business that you spend too little time on growing it. If you want your business to grow YOU have to make the time to grow it.
Too many business owners get trapped in their business and then wonder why they didn’t achieve the growth goals they set out back in January. To stop yourself from falling into the same trap you need to take continuous action to grow your business. This isn’t as difficult as you think. The main barrier that prevents most business owners from doing this is “not enough time”. Do you resonate with that?
Well let’s take a bit of a reality check…answer these questions:
- What will happen if you don’t achieve the growth you are after?
- Is that a sustainable position?
I’m going to assume that you do need to grow your business as you have aspirations to grow beyond your current business position. The only way to do that is to get very focused on creating the time to work on your business. Now this is totally possible to do so don’t switch off!
The key steps to achieving it are:
- Be realistic over the time you need to spend to grow your business to achieve your goals.
- Know how to drive your behaviour to be more time efficient. I could write a whole book on just this bullet point alone. To get you started just think about the volume of work you can churn out when you know you are about to go on holiday. No matter how efficient you think you are at time management there is always room for improvement (this is how I ended up working in my car between appointments!).
- Set aside dedicated time in your diary to work on your marketing. This is basically a very important appointment that if you don’t keep you won’t achieve the growth you are after, so book it into your diary as if it was an important appointment. Otherwise it’s all too easy to let other things take priority over this key growth activity with a result of minimal growth.
- Get 100% focused on your ideal clients and where you can find them.
- Implement one new marketing channel at a time. Once you have it established try and automate it or systemise it so you can outsource it. Each time you do that you have the space to implement a new one (check out my blog on “Are you a well-kept secret” for more info on this).
The only barriers that exist to growing your business are the ones you put there yourself so if growing your business is important to you then set aside time to achieve it.