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Firstly, just about every business owner wants to grow their business, but many don’t know how! One of the main reasons businesses fail, is due to uncontrolled growth, so whilst growing your business is important, controlled growth is essential.
Many think that to grow a business you focus on increased sales. Increased sales does not always mean increased profit, and therefore you need to focus increased sales from targeted clients, or targeted services/products that are beneficial for you.
How do I increase sales? Growth in sales will come from a few sources, namely new clients, increased income from existing clients, or depending on the overall strategy, could be achieved by acquiring other businesses.
To further increase sales, you would normally adopt a marketing strategy whereby consideration can be given to how much money you want to spend in marketing for new clients and what the best form of marketing is for your business. Every business is different, and therefore you need to assess what marketing strategies may best suit your business. Consideration may be given to marketing mediums such as media, print, direct contact through current clients and most importantly social media. It is also important to measure the success of marketing strategies to hold some form of accountability.
Growing your business is not just about increased income. As businesses grow, attention also needs to be given to enhancing the team, its systems, premises, technology and its financial reporting, including monitoring of actual to budget performance.
We strongly recommend business owners consider its strategic direction by documenting a business plan on where they want to get to, and assess strategic options on how to achieve that. We can help with this!
Finally, most people want a balance in life, whether employee or business owner. Yes, being a business owner brings additional responsibilities, and in most cases, working longer hours, so it is even more important to ensure you have down-time and a life outside of business. I believe that everyone should have an interest or hobby that is not work or family. It is important to have an interest where you can focus on just that, and not be distracted by work. Examples of interests that allow release of work can be sport, hobby, reading a book, yoga, meditation or simply just taking a walk.
A person close to me once said, “Do you live to work, or work to live?” I think he was telling me that he thought that I was working too much, and everything in my life revolved around business. We all know that feeling! The reality is that we have choices in our life, we can choose how much time we want to devote to our work/business and how much time we want to devote to family, friends, and more importantly yourself. When is the last time you did something for yourself? Do you have a regular routine where you can get away from your business? OR just simply zone out and focus on something that may seem so insignificant, yet is so important for your mental health and wellbeing?
At the end of the day, you decide on your own work/life balance…What do you choose today and more importantly, what are you going to choose for the future?
