To expand and grow as a business is every company’s goal. This can sound like a difficult task especially for small to medium businesses with little financial pool to pull resources from. Thankfully, there are some things that money can’t buy, and that is a good approach to business.
As a business owner, your approach to handling your business will be the deciding factor in whether your company will sink or swim. You need to grow, not just as a person, but also as a reliable leader with an eye for making things work and making strategies for your employees to follow.
Let’s take a look at some ways to improve your business performance.
Set Achievable Short-term Goals
Expanding your business is an already established goal; it’s basically every business owner’s dream to develop and grow their company. However, this goal is too broad and long term, to the point that it can be daunting to look at and paralyzes you with the lack of action during the ‘now’.
Instead of focusing on a faraway goal, make shorter yet achievable goals that will motivate you and your staff to do better. You can scale your goals and create milestones: a weekly goal to a monthly goal, then a yearly goal to a 5-year goal. These goals can be something small, such as finding a good mortgage broker for your office for a weekly goal or moving to a new location as a monthly goal, and then establishing your business’ presence in the new location for a half-year goal. Make your targets realistic and achievable, as targeting something that’s out of reach will simply frustrate you and your employees.
By breaking down your big goal into smaller steps, you’re also creating a strategy for your company to follow. These small steps contribute to the bigger picture, and by the end of two and a half years, you’ll find that you have achieved a lot of your goals and have made a step closer to the big one.
Specify Your Target Market
A common folly among small business owners is thinking that they can target everyone. You know how it goes: assuming that everyone’s a part of your target demographic, and marketing through the usual advertising medium. Sadly, this only leads to more expense on your part, with very little to gain from.
It’s better to be more specific with who your demographic is. Accepting that not everyone will buy your products or services is the first step in finding who will. Don’t be afraid to be very specific, if anything it’s helpful as it will help you narrow down the qualities of the people who are most likely to patronize your services. It’s great to know their habits, such as virtual spaces they frequent, or physical locations they converge in- knowing this will allow you to make strategic advertisements. This then allows you to save expenses on advertising as you’ll be turning more leads into sales than when you were simply targeting a ‘general’ demographic.
Once you’ve specified your target market and have found the most common places they frequent, it’s best to get in touch with ad agencies that have marketing power in that area as you will save more money advertising in places where there are people who’ll purchase your products and services.
Put the Right People on the Job
Assigning tasks to people can be very difficult. We tend to give tasks and assignments based on the idea of ‘equal workload’, making sure that everyone works the same amount of hours or does the same gravity of tasks.
Sadly, this is not effective, or even realistic as we all have different skills and attributes that make accomplishing different tasks easier or harder. As the leader in your company, knowing your staff’s strengths and weaknesses is crucial to giving them the right tasks. It’s good to have a profile of your employees, with their skills and abilities included as this will let you know who can do what task better. Perhaps you have artistic people in your staff or even those good in logistics- these people can provide a better result when working in those said tasks versus assigning them in work they won’t excel at.
This also makes your company more efficient as assigning your employees to their strengths means fewer mistakes and fewer expenses correcting those mistakes. You might find that you don’t have to outsource tasks too, you just need to know who among your employees have the talent to do it.
