Postmodernist author and cultural icon William S. Burroughs once said, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” His words apply to a wide range of situations — from interpersonal growth to intrapersonal growth and everything in-between — but, especially, to small business growth.
If your business isn’t growing, it’s slowly dying. That may seem overly pessimistic, but when you reduce all the variables down to their simplest form, you begin to see that there really are only two sides to the story: growth or decline.
Even stagnation (the state between growth and decline) is just the precursor to the downward slope of your business metrics.
When you realize that growth plays a key role in the success of your business, you begin to understand why it’s vital to focus a good portion of your time and energy on this essential activity.
In this article, the management experts at Sling give you 10 tips to accelerate your small business growth and keep your company profitable and successful.
10 Tips To Accelerate Small Business Growth
1) Build An Effective Team
Your team is the heart and soul of your organization and plays a crucial part in your small business growth. Even if you only employ one or two team members, it’s vital to expend every effort to put together the best team possible.
Here are some resources to help you in this regard:
- 10 Group Cohesion Strategies For Developing Teams At Work | GetSling
- 10 Ways To Improve Work Performance In Your Teams
2) Get To Know Your Customers
Getting to know your customers is about more than just knowing their names. It’s about knowing what makes them tick: their likes, their dislikes, their motivations.
It’s also about stepping back from the individual to identify them as a group. Are the majority of your customers married with children, or are they single? Male or female? What income bracket do they fall into? How old are they?
When you get to know your customers in this way, you can tailor your offerings to appeal to the group and, as a result, supercharge your business growth.
3) Take Advantage Of Social Media
Social media is (or should be) the cornerstone of your marketing and communication efforts.
With Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and the like, you can stay in touch with your core customers, offer discounts, and grow your business by leaps and bounds.
4) Build A Sales Plan For Small Business Growth
Building a sales plan requires work on the front-end, but, once established, it will automate your business and enable you to scale and grow quickly and easily.
Here are some resources to help you develop your own sales plan:
5) Schedule Your Team Efficiently
Scheduling your team efficiently means more than just getting it done quickly. It means building the best schedule to fit the needs of your employees, your customers, and your business.
That can be a daunting task regardless of the size of your business. Here are a few valuable articles to help you master the art and science of scheduling your team:
6) Provide Excellent Customer Service
Good customer service can mean the difference between strong small business growth and no growth at all. It’s key to your business’s success. Take the time to train your employees so they know how to provide the best customer service possible.
Check out these informative articles for strategies to improve the customer-facing activities in your business:
- The 20 Most Important Customer Service Skills You Need To Have
- How To Write The Perfect Customer Service Job Description
7) Grow Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty was once a difficult part of your business to nurture. But with the reach of social media, knowledge about your core market, and a strong sales plan, increasing customer loyalty has never been easier.
8) Emphasize Professional Development
Professional development — both for you and your employees — is critical if you’re concerned about small business growth. Always strive to improve your managerial skills and the skills of your employees on the front line.
Here are some valuable resources to get you started:
- How To Be A Good Manager In 10 Easy Steps
- 12 Essential Qualities Of A Manager That Guarantee Success
- 12 Areas That Employees Can Improve On
- 16 Types Of Employees And How To Motivate Them
9) Create An Organizational Strategy
Without an organizational strategy, your business has no direction. In addition, it’s much more difficult to tell if your business is growing, standing still, or declining.
If you’re operating without a strategy of any kind, implement one right away so that you have a foundation on which to make decisions.
Organizational strategy is composed of three levels — corporate, business, and functional — each with their own purpose. Take the time to understand how they all fit together to promote small business growth.
10) Get Control Of Your Numbers
It’s virtually impossible to grow your business if you don’t have control of key numbers such as:
Once you identify these numbers and bring them under control, they’ll give you insight into whether your business is growing or not.
Accelerate Your Small Business Growth With The Best Software
Sling is a suite of tools designed to help you, the busy manager, nurture and grow your small (or medium or large) business.
The heart of the Sling software is its artificial-intelligence-based scheduling module that includes intuitive features like:
- Employee and task color coding
- Recurring shifts
- Time-off notices
- Double-booking and overlapping shift notifications
- Templates
- And much more…
Sling also contains a built-in time clock and employee work and attendance tracker. With this unique feature, you can turn any smartphone, tablet, or computer into a clock-in, clock-out tool.
You can even control labor costs and prevent time theft by establishing geofences around your business and setting limits on how early and how late employees can clock in or out.
But the benefits don’t stop there. With Sling, you also get:
- Cloud-based schedule distribution and communication
- A wide range of reports to help you make adjustments for the future
- Paid-time-off control to help you keep expenses low
- Powerful messaging features
- Your very own newsfeed
- Task lists for you and your employees
When you harness the power of the Sling app, you’ll save countless hours each week that you can then dedicate to growing your small business and ensuring its success.
For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.
