Entrepreneurs often thinking about taking their business to next level and making it bigger than previous year. What they forget is asking themselves how to get there. Yes, that’s hard but there’s no escaping it.
To have an intact base of 10,000 customer in business, a concrete plan of what to do each day has to be the approach. If you are blank about how distant you are from reaching the milestone, you are building castles in the air.
Getting caught up in the regular things that eat away all the time is a plague every business deals with. Before you do anything to take the business further, the week bids goodbye.
Today, we will discuss the most important things business owners should do and how to put them in action. Inhaled a sigh of relief? Reading further will make you feel light further.
1. Customer Development
Learning from leads and customers is important every day. Adopting this habit will let you understand who are your customers are and how you can fix their problems. To market your brand efficaciously and opening new opportunities, you must befriend this healthy habit.
When a new user replies to the email, jump in and find everything about them. Who they are, what requirements they have and how you stand out from others. Save the responses and allow yourself as well as your team to access it for future possibilities.
Individuals running a digital agency can utilize customer development to narrow down the market and specialize. After completion of a project, call the client to know how things went and how happy or unhappy they are.
To get a tighter grasp and better understand the customer, share the feedback with you team.
2. Think About the Big Picture
Take out some free hours, go for a walk alone, enjoy a coffee and think over these questions:
Relationships are the most powerful asset for an entrepreneur because:
- What is your dream company? Have you achieved it?
- Is there anything your competitors haven’t done yet but audience is yearning for?
- Is it time to offer new products/services to the existing clients?
- Does it make sense to think about a new industry while maintaining the unique value proposition?
- Is it time to focus on what’s trending instead of wasting resources on hopeless or uncertain markets or products?
To guide your people in the right direction, spending enough time on customer development is valuable.
Take the data you have unveiled from customer research and discuss with board members, investors, mentors, co-founders and employees not sometimes but regularly.
3. Learning
Smart entrepreneurs know the rewards of soaking up knowledge from those who are ahead them. This attitude is a gateway to learn skills related to expanding your business like marketing, design, technology, sales and customers’ industries.
Staying in tune with unrelated topics such as pop culture, science, world culture, etc. intensifies the mind and allows to think about life from different perspective.
Read blogs, books and articles to stay up on. Other good ways to learn include podcasts, video training, webinars, online courses and conferences.
4. Establish Authority via Content
Read what others are saying and try applying it yourself. Why? Because you will gather priceless knowledge and insight to please others.
If not used to blogging, start now. Taking out some time to offer value for others will shower mind-boggling benefits on you. Not only you will get to create subscriber list but also partnerships with promising influencers.
Start a podcast if not a hardcore writer. Building strong audience and growing it impeccably gets easy this way.
5. Nurturing Fruitful Relationships
Relationships are the most powerful asset for an entrepreneur because:
- They help in getting funds when needed
- They create channel partnerships to grow business
- They increase exposure to the content
Fix a certain time each week and invest it to follow new and useful people on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Also, connect with your favorite authors and bloggers. Don’t ask for favors but do appreciate their content. Feature them in your content or offer to help them.
Podcast is a wonderful way to network and form relationships with sharp people. You can reach out to people who have extensive followings and fit your customer persona's.
6. Investing in Own People
Your employees are your greatest asset and you must invest time to develop them.
Spend time with them
Being together grows culture in the office. Go together for dinners, movies, shows or game nights to build healthy bonds.
Regular reviews
Employees expect a formal review or feedback of their process. This helps them know how well they are doing and where they need to grow.
It also helps you to know their thoughts about the company and their job. Conducting a brief meeting is a good way to boost their confidence and challenge them to polish their skills.
Don’t forget to praise them for their efforts and improvement. Guide them on how they can improve their talent further.
Grow their skills
Ask them where they want to be, where there passion lies and what excites them. Teach them new skills and techniques they must know. Conduct workshops and let them represent the company in meetings & conferences.
7. Growth
A systematic way to come up with growth ideas, test them and learn from the results is ‘growth hacking.’ Following this approach will allow you to grow at a faster rate.
Look at the many steps in your marketing funnel and run tests, as it will make you learn how to grow faster than competitors.
After finding a process that suits you, meet with your team every week and develop growth tests. Measure, analyze and learn from them.
Conclusion
During the initial days of a business, you focus on everything from account management, sales, marketing, landing pages, client service to product development.
With growing years and more people joining, shift your attention towards being a leader who is particular about aiming on the business and not in the business.
