Growing your business
Strengths Build on your own and your organisation's strengths and core competencies, shore up weaknesses, and develop a marketing strategy.
Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality. Remember that growing turnover usually requires more working capital. Produce financial forecasts and make sure the resources are in place to cope with business expansion. Women's businesses are capitalised to just one third of the level of their male counterparts and this is the key issue hampering their growth.
When you want to grow sales, don't be too tempted to 'buy' turnover by offering discounts - better to add value and charge a premium price.
Segment your market Find out why your customers buy from you. Use this information to identify other groups of potential customers and send them a powerful sales message.
The Pareto Principle suggests that your 20% best customers will provide 80% of your revenues. Get to know these customers even better with a formal or informal survey and consider what more you can offer them.
Planning While considering the possibilities of expanding your markets, plan all four (strategic, financial, structural and organisational) categories of growth.
Implement systems, policies and procedures (it sounds bureaucratic but it will help!)
Be open to changing the company's processes, culture and attitudes as it grows and develops.