5 Growth Strategies for Next Year

Seeing business growth doesn’t just happen – it requires strategy. If you want to ease yourself into your most profitable year yet and create momentum, keep reading.

At the time of this posting, we’re at the tail-end of 2019 and two months away from the next year. It’s the time of year when we round-up our gains and losses and start thinking and prepping about what’s ahead.

Now, my mentor, Alan Weiss, says, “The only place you coast is downhill”.

If you’ve got big goals for your next business year, there’s no coasting allowed.

5 Growth Strategies

If you’re not going to coast, you need to intentionally build your business. Here are five growth strategies to do just that:

#1: Do the math and set a goal

You need to set a goal. Listen: you cannot and will not generate growth in your business if you don’t know what it is you’re striving for.

Growth doesn’t happen perchance. Growth requires strategy. Are you trying to grow your business by 10%? Are you trying to grow your business by 30%?

You need to do the math and set a goal.

In order for you to set a goal, you need to take a look at that goal so that you know exactly what you are aiming for. If you don’t know what the destination is, it’s going to be really, really, really hard to get there.

So, number one: take a look at your numbers from this year and figure out where you want to end up by the end of next year.

#2: Figure out what you’re selling and how many customers you need to hit your goal

Let’s say, for ease of reference, you want to hit $100,000.

If you want to hit $100,000, there are many ways to do that. Here are a few of those ways:

• Five $20,000 clients
• Twenty $5,000 clients
• A hundred $1,000 clients.

You need to know what and how many “things” you need to sell.

Whether that “thing” is a product or a service, you need to break down the numbers and figure out how much you need to sell in a year. Then, break it down even further to figure out how much you need to sell on a monthly or a weekly basis in order to hit your goals.

You cannot reverse engineer your marketing or anything else in your business to hit your numbers if you don’t know what “it” is. Figure out what you’re selling and set a price.

Here’s an example from my own coaching business. When I first started coaching, I was charging $12,000 or $18,000 a year to work with me. I knew I needed 10 people to work with me for a year and I’d be able to hit my six-figure goal.

Do you know what you’re selling? And do you know how many people you need to do business with in order to hit that goal? This is growth strategy number two.

#3: Get clear on where your lead sources are coming from

Now that you know how many customers you need in order to hit your goal, you need to know where to find them.

So, where do your lead sources hang out? Do you get leads from social media? Or, do you get referrals from clients? Do you get leads when you speak?

People often double down on the sources that generate the poorest ROI. Don’t do that.

In order to figure out where you get your lead sources, look back at all the business you got this year and ask yourself:

• How did they find me?
• How did I get that business?

This requires digging and intentional thought.

Get clear on what the top three places are that you generate leads from. If you’re not focusing on those lead sources –  you’re not focusing on those activities as part of your marketing strategy. And that means you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

You’re basically getting by with the low-hanging fruit, and you can do better than that.

I know you can.

#4: Put a customer retention plan in place

Two years ago, I created and hired a new role on my team. This person’s primary goal is to retain clients. They’re responsible for obsessing about how we could retain our existing clients and how we could do such great work that they never wanted to leave working with us.

And guess what…? After I hired this team member, my business has more than doubled in size. It’s actually almost tripled in size.

Don’t underestimate the value of treating your best clients exceptionally well.

Retention is a fantastic strategy for growth because if you’re not retaining clients, you’re reinventing the wheel all over and over again. Trying to find and successfully replace people is hard work.

Instead, figure out what it is that you can do to retain your clients so that any new clients are incremental growth on top of the baseline that you already have. The cherry on top.

Preserve your existing customers and serve them well.

#5: Set a goal to increase in your sales and market accordingly

The second goal you need to crystalize after you’ve done steps one to four is to find the percentage increase that you want in sales.

You might want a 100% increase in sales. Whether it’s a 30% or 300% increase in sales, you need to amplify your marketing by the same percentage you set.

If you want to double your sales, you need to double your marketing because it doesn’t just happen by accident. This is a cause and effect. You generate what happens in your business and you generate it by the activities that you choose to give your attention, focus and effort.

I wish I could inject this into every single entrepreneur out there.

If you want to grow your business or double your business profits – you need to double your marketing efforts. It’s your strategic marketing effort that will really help you generate the biggest return in growth.

You cannot be a best-kept secret

Listen: you cannot afford to be a best-kept secret if you want to grow, if you want to serve more people or if you want to make a bigger difference in the world. If you want to pay yourself more than that stat that says that most self-employed people pay themselves less than $22,000 a year, you need to make a strategic change.

You need to double down on your marketing in order to make it all happen.

If you want to see growth in your next year in business, don’t just read these words – apply them.

How and when are you going to work through these five strategies?