Business owners have a way of envisioning things on a larger lens for they know too well the back stops with them. It can be through goal setting to push their limits and continuous improvement as they compete against themselves (or with others). There are various ways one can uplevel their business.
Here’s how entrepreneurs and business owners take their business to the next level.
#1- Stretching the current level of thinking
You’ve reached your current level based on your current default thoughts and behaviors. To reach your next level, new behaviors and thoughts are required, and a mindset coach will help you stretch your current level of thinking. Hustle can only get you so far, but thinking in new ways – about yourself, your business, money, your customer’s problems and the solution – is how you break through the plateau.
Thanks to Samantha Siffring
#2- Test and learn
Follow the approach of ‘Develop, Test, Learn, and Launch' when coming up with new initiatives for your business. Iterate with your team, develop, test, and launch these new ideas. If these ideas pan out, that's great! If not, be willing to fail and try again and give it 100% of your hard work and effort.
Thanks to Deborah Sweeney, MyCorporation.com!
#3- Investing in a strong online presence!
Whatever your product, you’re going to need capital in order to expand. You create capital one of two ways: investors, and sales. Both of these things can be gained by building a website that maximizes customer experience and leaves them coming back for more! The fastest, most effective way to do this is to hire a reputable SEO agency. Yes, they often don’t come cheap. But if you want to take your business to the next level in this digital era, it’s an investment that you can’t afford NOT to make!
Thanks to Deepak Shukla
#4- Invest in your employees
We've decided to build a learning organization culture and have our employees take online classes. We have created a Grow Your Craft fund, where we give employees $1,000 to spend on an online course of their choice. The only requirement is that it has to connect to the functional work area that the employee is in right now. We currently have employees enrolled in courses doing Google Analytics, Google Adwords, SQL, Data Analysis, and more. It has been a huge hit across the company with 80% adoption so far. As we invest in our employees, our business will grow and prosper.
Thanks to Kevin Miller, The Word Counter!
#5- Continous learning
To ensure that your business is growing, never stop applying new learnings. Investing on new (and better!) machinery, researching for software that will help you to accomplish your tasks more effectively and faster, brainstorming with your team to come up with new methods and strategies, and being updated in the trends so your content can be timely and useful for your audience; this is how we keep up being on the next level that guarantees the success of our business.
Thanks to Alex Perkins, All the Stuff!
#6- Promote diversity
When building your organization, it's important to promote diversity in your company. This has always been a key driver for me at Semtech and it will continue to be – especially in times like today's climate. There is a direct link between diversity and innovation. I truly believe that we get the highest level of differentiation and innovation with the most diverse thinking. Diversity drives a culture of diverse thinking and then a higher level of innovation. Diversity should never be just a check in the box. It has to be something we just do as professionals, as business leaders and as human beings. I'm proud to say that my company has some of the most diverse leaders in the industry because we hire the best. Diversity in race, gender or anything enables us to think different. I wish we could do more. Especially in today's climate. It's hard when a company that doesn't see the value and I hope that every company and enterprise in the world sees that value.
Thanks to Mohan Maheswaran, Semtech!
#7- Focus on reputation and customer experience
Taking a business to the next level can be tough, it requires knowing what makes your customer tick and how to get reach in a way that fosters growth and adoption of whatever you are selling. In our business, we relied heavily on reputation and customer experience to grow the business to new levels. That includes ensuring all emails and calls are responded to within the hour, being available on weekends and following through on each and every commitment we make. By following this it sets us apart from other digital agencies who work 9-5 and often leave customers with pressing or urgent matters stuck waiting for help and peace of mind.
Thanks to Sir Sanju Ganglani, gang&lani media!
#8- Increase your performance
Part of what you do as a small business owner would be routine; you will have to do a number of everyday activities to maintain the company going smoothly. The most successful you are in managing the day-to-day duties of company administration (those you don't assign, that is), the more opportunity the small company has for greater performance. Through designing frameworks to streamline certain operations, you will increase your efficiency.
Thanks to Eliza Nimmich, Tutor the People!
#9- Set realistic short term and long term goals
Set realistic short term and long term goals and plan out every step necessary to reach those goals within time windows that we set as a team. As a leader, it's important to be the architect for the blueprint of your team, while balancing this with giving enough autonomy to each individual to expand beyond what's on their plate.
Thanks to Jason Wong, DoeLashes!
#10- Hire carefully chosen people
To take your business to the next level you have to replace yourself with sharp and motivated people who take on tasks you currently handle. Hire carefully, trust your gut and your instincts and then give the chosen people enough autonomy to help your company grow. Hire a recruiter to find more excellent people. Move someone in your organization from operations to training so that new people can be on-boarded smoothly and consistently. Hire others to perform every single administrative task you now do so you can instead focus on whatever it is you do better than other people. Identify your unique and special gifts and try to spend as much of your time focusing only on those things. Give the rest of your daily functions away to others. Treat your employees exceptionally well, always give them the respect they deserve, nurture their goals and their careers, empower them and always remember that your business is only as good as your people. Appreciate every person who comes to work each and every day and gives you their time and effort.
Thanks to Tali Raphaely, Armour Title Company!
#11- Customer-first mindset
As an event insurance company, 2020 saw our sales drop dramatically as events around the US were cancelled. Taking your business to the next level requires making tough decisions during challenging times. Even with sales dropping we decided to lower our broker fee, waive all cancellation fees, and increase our service hours. We know hosting an event is challenging right now, so our goal was to make one part of this process easier for customers so they could focus on other important tasks. These decisions already increased customer retention and we received wonderful feedback from all our customers who have purchased with us through this process. This customer-first mindset immediately increased our referrals as more customers recommend our services to friends and loved ones.
Thanks to Zeshan Jeewanjee, One Day Event Insurance!
#12- Dedicated work on the follow-ups
We are constantly searching for new clients, but have you tried to follow-up? Search your inbox and see your connections for the past year. Contact them again, work out the budget, and any other issues that didn't help in cracking the deal. Follow-up is very important, but with ongoing projects, we often forget to communicate with our pitches. What I have decided is to hire a virtual assistant who will just manage the follow-ups. This idea is already helping us a lot! I am sure it will work for you too.
Thanks to Adam Rowles, Inbound Marketing Agency!
#13- Taking calculated risks
Learn to pinpoint your acceptable level of loss and understand that failure will happen – a lot. Do a lot of research and anticipate mistakes. When I adopted this mindset, I could visualize the possible outcomes of my decision and pick the best one. Also, allow room for missteps as not every move you take and the decision you make will succeed. Then learn from those failures and use it to try something else. When it comes to risks, all you need to do is say yes. That's all there is to it, and you'll be set for the future. You'll be able to take your business to the next level.
Thanks to Israel Gaudette, Link Tracker Pro!
#14- Choose the right channels
Social media can be an amazing growth tool for a small business, and its value cannot be understated given that it is free. After finding your target audience, figure out how you are going to reach them. What social media do they spend the most time on? Facebook and Instagram are two very popular choices that don’t have to break the bank. There isn’t one channel that’s the ‘best’, but there is one that’s the best for your business. Look at the culture of each channel and what types of products are marketed there.
Thanks to David Adler, The Travel Secret!
#15- Break through mental barriers
“That which we need the most will be found where we least want to look.” ~ Carl Jung. If you want to Next Level your company, you have to go through a breakthrough. Breakthroughs require a sort of ego-death; solutions to old problems have become your new biggest problems, for which you need new solutions. I guarantee you are holding yourself back in some way, and you’re not yet aware of it, but the second you do become aware of it, you will begin to breakthrough. Your company’s growth is limited only in proportion to the amount of truth you can take in. My company has broken through many mental barriers before. At first, I was too afraid of being successful beyond $100,000 a year—my unconscious was worried that my friends and family would reject me if I made more than that amount because none of them did. I had to allow that fear to die, in order to break the ceiling. Later on, I was prioritizing my employee’s liking me over my company’s success. This allowed a sort of codependent relationship where an employee would take advantage of their payroll while not doing work the company required. Once I let go of this need to be liked, my company again met another level of success. Both of these issues were in my mind at first; they were entirely my responsibility.
Thanks to Jonathan Sparks, Sparks Law!
#16- Make your work scalable
In order to take your business to the next level, your work must be scalable. In my case as an online service provider, I am currently working on building a new course that is fully scalable so that part of my income is residual and the other part is active service work. Other options are learning to outsource work to other people in an agency-like model, doing group coaching programs, or even paid events. Overall, the transition from purely service work to scalable methods that bring in a good portion of your income is one of the best ways to take your business to the next level.
Thanks to Dayana Mayfield
#17- Setting goals
Determine your yearly goals and set up mini-goals throughout each quarter to effectively grow your business to the next level. Goal setting is something that is often overlooked and undervalued, but having clear goals set at the beginning of every fiscal year will help you and your company stay on track while continuing to progress and grow the company. Try and make some of your goals a little far fetched because getting yourself and your employees out of their comfort zone will only help push the business
towards greater success. The more you can challenge yourself and your company, the easier it will be to take your company to the next level. Growing pains are common in a business, but tackling them on the front end by setting goals throughout the year will help alleviate some of the pain while also setting your business up for greater success.
Thanks to Jenny Massey, Snowy Pines White Labs!
#18- Hire people who are closers
To scale your business, you need more sales and clients. This is why I always recommend hiring salespeople who can close more deals. I have been in sales all my life, and after all these years I realized that having three below average versions of me is not enough and will not take my business to the next level. You need to hire salespeople who are closers and that are smarter than you. Hire others to do the jobs or daily operations that you do not enjoy doing or even don’t have time to complete. This way you can focus on more tasks that you are good at and your company can continue to grow and operate at full speed.
Thanks to Roland Reznik, Credit Repair Kings!
#19- Creating systems
One of the hardest challenges faced by entrepreneurs and business owners is how to work on their business rather than in their business. Removing one's self from the daily activities of the business is the number one priority. But how do you do that when your business relies on you to supervise, delicate and approve everything. The only way to take your business to the next level is to build systems into your business and turn it into an asset of value. By creating a system for every element of your business allows you to outsource those tasks to other people to free up your time for high-income generation tasks. When it comes to selling your business, investors will by your business systems and not you, which means that your business is scalable. This is how I am taking my business to the next level.
Thanks to Gareth Bain, Got Legs Digital!
#20- Three ways
It takes lots of hard work and effort to take your average small business to another level. And even apart from that, there are many external factors that affect your chances of growing and advancing your business. First of all, you have to create a business plan and assess your financial state. This is the first step and it should be taken very seriously. A business plan will guide you towards a safe and successful path. Second, keeping up with technology is important in today's world. Automation, digital marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) all of these are there to make your work not only easier and efficient but cost-efficient too. Lastly, focusing on customer experience, journey and service is becoming more and more important every day. Customer feedback is becoming a crucial aspect of success and answering their queries and questions is a must now.
Thanks to Jennifer Willy, Etia.Com!
|