The dynamic nature of the business world demands that business leaders stay agile and adapt to changing conditions. To foster growth, businesses can benefit from participating in a growth programme that provides tailored expertise to help navigate the challenges of a constantly evolving market.
Organisations looking to weather these storms and seize opportunities when they arise to enable growth must be prepared for changes. In an ideal scenario, these changes will be well within the capacity of the business to handle. To ensure that this is so, organisations must make business growth a key part of their change management strategies.
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The ways in which a business grows over time can cover various aspects, including:
As a business owner, you must know that growth may occur in some of these areas, without taking place in others. For example, if an organisation is increasing sales due to its existing customers buying more, profits and overall revenue may rise, without the business actually growing its customer base.
Growth matters to businesses of all sizes.
For start-up organisations, growth is essential for establishing a position in the market and achieving a level of profit or productivity that enables the business to cover its costs, and still have resources left over for other purposes. Every startup must have a strategy for growth as a part of its business plan.
Even established and stable businesses may need tailored support to achieve growth. An increase in sales and profits can help them build a liquidity fund to hedge against future risks, but they may also need to explore new markets or optimize their supply chains. By seeking out these opportunities and receiving tailored support, mature businesses can continue to thrive and stay ahead of the competition.
In all cases, growing is key for the long-term sustainability of a business. This growth can be internal, with the company developing its workforce in order to raise output. Alternatively, external growth can occur if the business merges with another organisation, or is taken over in an acquisition.
When it comes to small businesses, there is a wide variance in the size of enterprises, and their capacity to grow. Growing businesses is no easy task. However, as a whole, these smaller-scale enterprises share common characteristics in terms of their degree of autonomy or independence of action, diverse organisational structures, and diverse management styles.
The roots of 21st-century business growth theory date back to 1983, and the results of an exhaustive analysis conducted by researchers at the Harvard Business Review that identifies five key stages of small business growth. They are:
Key issues for the business at this stage include its ability to achieve core objectives such as attracting enough customers and effectively delivering the products or services offered by the enterprise.
Businesses at this stage range from start-up ventures to high-technology manufacturers that are yet to stabilise their production capacity or product quality.
Having demonstrated that they are a workable venture with the capacity to exist, the issue at Stage II becomes one of maintaining a flow of cash and resources that enable the organisation to continue to survive.
Many small enterprises will remain at this stage for some time, earning marginal returns on their invested time and capital.
At this stage, the growing business has attained true economic health, with enough product-market penetration and organisational scale to earn average or above-average profits.
At this expansive stage in the development of a small business, the key issues are how to grow rapidly, and how to finance that growth. During this pivotal time, the enterprise has the potential to increase in stature and become a big business.
Businesses achieving this level of growth have the staff and financial resources needed to engage in detailed operational and strategic planning. Their aims will typically include consolidating and controlling the financial gains brought on by rapid growth, and retaining the advantages of small size, such as flexibility of response and the independent entrepreneurial spirit.
These four strategies are of particular importance to any business looking to expand:
Achieving a stable and successful expansion of the enterprise can be challenging, and often requires knowledge and expertise beyond what is available within the company. This is where business growth services, which provide tailored support and higher education on how to deliver results, can be invaluable.
Some are government sponsored schemes, while others are private ventures. They all tend to have certain elements in common, including:
Growth strategies for companies in the technology sector follow a pattern similar to the four growth strategies outlined above for businesses in general. However, tech business growth services and frameworks adopt a specific focus that includes:
More broadly, there are two crucial strategies for promoting growth that business operators can pursue in all sectors of the economy. They are:
Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) spend a lot of time and effort generating leads, but little in following up and converting them into actual sales.
The growth opportunity here lies in using technology to create a single repository for storing leads, with tracking, monitoring, and communications features that can identify where each lead is along the sales funnel/customer journey, who is responsible for interacting with them, and what form that interaction needs to take.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or Customer Management System (CMS) will assist in monitoring and optimising the various channels of online or offline communication, between consumers and your business. Effective customer engagement pays dividends, as this graphic from Gallup demonstrates:
(Image source: Gallup)
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This guide will have given you some idea of the concepts and methods that business growth services and technology systems for startups through to scaleups and enterprise have to offer.
To discover how Incisive Edge can take your business growth efforts to the next level, get in touch with us today.