Grow your business the smart way
Posted on February 28, 2018 by Phil Bedford, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
One of the biggest reasons small businesses fail is the misallocation of precious resources. Namely, time and money. We need to work smart not hard
Over the years I had met many ex- Marketing and Sales Managers who launch their own business secure in their ability to grow their business, after all, they did well when they worked for a big company, and all they have to do is the same again right?-Wrong!
Normal, marketing, by which I mean advertising, websites, print, exhibitions, TV radio etc. are valuable ways of getting in front of new clients if you can afford it. And here lies the issue; if people don’t have money to spend on historic marketing then suddenly their skill set is challenged. If they can’t afford a sales team and they have no marketing budget, then they have no one to sell to!
Other new small business owners, freelancers and coaches often have it harder because many were not in a business development role at all and so the whole concept of business development is alien and more than a little scary.
Small business owners often out the hard way that the first year working for one’s self is a bit of a honeymoon period where we think “ I am so good and passionate about what I do, I have such a great idea that people will just come and I will grow” It often takes year before they realize that what worked before in a big company doesn’t work now ( unless they are fortunate to have acquired a big investor, but then this comes with another set of challenges) and that their #1 role is actually business development.
Running a small business is completely different especially with a startup (companies are considered to be in a startup in the first five years). People tend to be time rich and money poor whereas more established businesses tend to be time-starved and money rich.
So if our biggest resource is time and by that we mean our time then it stands to reason that we need to look at ways of growing our business using our time rather than money (which we have limited supplies of).
My advice is to seek out ways to grow your business through relationships, Word of Mouth, speaking, and free PR, networking, referrals, your friends, sports clubs and yes, social media but learn how to leverage it without paying ( to start with ). If you don’t know where to start then, you can learn because it is a skill just like being a dentist, engineer, lawyer, coach or designer- and you can learn.
Studies by experts like Dr Ivan Misner of BNI have shown that 90% of small business relies on up to 70% of their new business by relationships, but only 3% have any plan to leverage this powerful resource. That’s a lot of potential stored in your phone and in your database.
