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by Rick Gendemann
Business Succession & Transition Planning
November 27, 2024

How to Grow Your Business – Part 4

Welcome to our 4th and final article of our 4-part series on how to grow your business. Most business owners are currently working on or have plans of growing their business. As noted in our previous articles, to fully leverage your investment in marketing for growth, generate the best results to maximize profitability and long-term success for your business, you should consider the “4 Ways to Grow Your Business” in greater depth. By not addressing things from this perspective, you are missing out on invaluable opportunities to grow and build the value of your business.

Below is a summary of the 4 ways to grow your business that you need to consider:

  1. Increase the number of customers (but only of the type you want)
  2. Increase the number of times customers come back
  3. Increase the average value of each sale you make
  4. Increase the effectiveness of each process in your business.

In our previous articles we have examined three of the four ways you can grow your business. In this final article in the series, we look at the fourth way to grow your business – increase the effectiveness of each process in your business.

This last component is a crucial piece and brings the whole series together. For your business to reach its full profit potential it requires efficient systems and processes. You will no doubt appreciate that it will be difficult to implement the ideas discussed in the first 3 ways to grow your business without the business functioning smoothly. Technology enhancements and having the right people on your team are critical but without proper systems and processes the ‘machine’ won’t function very well. You need your processes to be streamlined, documented, consistent and standard to achieve the best outcomes.

In a business context, a process is ‘a series of steps and activities that transform an input into an output that is ultimately valued by the customer’. Your business involves a series of processes including production, marketing, selling, distribution and planning. It is the quality of these processes that really determines the quality of the outcomes. If you want to increase the number of customers, this will hinge on the effectiveness of your marketing processes. Improved customer retention will depend on how good your customer service processes are functioning.

To highlight the importance of efficient processes to your business outcomes, let’s assume your goal is to win new customers to increase revenues. You may think the solution involves giving your website a makeover or you decide to ramp up your marketing efforts to drive more leads. However, the issue might not be the number of leads your business is getting, but rather it could be the failure to more effectively convert those leads into customers.

The conversion is a sales process that may simply need some fine tuning and improvement to improve its success rate. Address how your sales team can perform more effectively with faster response time to customer emails and telephone enquiries. Remember, the secret is to identify inefficiencies and make required changes, and not jump to throwing more money and resources at your website, advertising or marketing.

Your business is a series of processes, and all too often business owners do not focus on continually viewing and improving the effectiveness of their various processes. They may be caught working too much “IN” the business as opposed to working “ON” the business. Remember to regularly review each of your processes to identify what’s working, what’s not working and what needs working on.

Today’s rate of technological change is forcing us to review our processes because there always seems to be a better, more efficient way to do things on the horizon. Looking back at the sales conversion process above, consider measuring and monitoring the average time your staff respond to emails and phone calls in conjunction with measuring the conversion rate for every sales team member. You may not need to spend any more money, but rather just improve the processes so your team converts more leads into sales.

Creating a culture where your team is focused on continuously reviewing and improving your business processes can really drive productivity and profit improvement. Think of opportunities to automate routine processes, improving flow of production activity in your facilities, implementing technologies to speed up processes and training staff to become more efficient and effective. You owe it to yourself to make this investment in growing the value of your business.

This brings us to the conclusion of the 4-part series of articles on the 4 Ways to Grow Your Business. We hope these articles have provided you with some helpful insights. As you reflect on these articles, remember that growing your business will work best when all four components are working effectively together. Now is the time to give thought on how you and your team can begin implementing some of the ideas presented and to also regularly brainstorm for other opportunities to help grow your business.

Still Have Questions About Growing Your Business?

If you are thinking about or currently working on growing your business, and need assistance, please contact Rick Gendemann, CPA, CA , one of our business advisory leaders. We look forward to the opportunity to connect with you to discuss your business and address how we may be able to work with you on developing and implementing your business sales strategy action plan.