Before you can devise the right growth strategy for your business, you want to make a commitment to growth and then decide how you are going to do it. In this post we’ll go over a few ideas that might be helpful in figuring out what comes naturally to you.
I recently caught up with one of my VIP Day clients. When we first met, she had wanted to reach six figures with her start-up—and then did it in a record time of five months. She’s on target to gross between $400K and $500K this year!
That was to be expected, because she’s a Firecracker. Firecrackers are women who take the information, implement it, and then take off. Just like a Firecracker—once they are lit, there is no stopping these kinds of women.
What I did not expect to hear was that she isn’t sure if she wants to grow further. As odd as it may sound, not everybody wants to grow their business. This client is the mother of a soon-to-be-teenager, almost everything about her home-based business is already outsourced, and she still maintains a “regular” job. This business owner has pushed it as far as she can in her current set-up.
The set-up of your business determines how far you can grow it. There comes a point where you max out what is possible.
Once you get to the turning point where you keep spinning around with the same revenue results, or your growth curve suddenly flattens, it’s time to decide what to do.
Here are the decisions that go into planning your next step:
- Get clear about whether you want a lifestyle business or a growth business. A lifestyle business is designed to create only enough income so that you can enjoy what matters to you. Nothing more. For example, if you have small children, want to spend lots of time with family and friends, and don’t want to work all hours of the day—then growth may not be your goal. But, if you want to grow and you are willing to do whatever it takes, read on.
- I advise you to connect with a consultant/coach/mentor who is specialized in devising growth strategies. Why? Because we cannot see our own roadblocks. I see this again and again with the business owners I guide to growth. It seems easy to see what others are doing or not doing, but we can’t objectively assess it for ourselves.
- Devise a few different growth strategies and follow the lean start-up business building idea. It simply means that you are not going to invest big money and development resources into production, new products, or new services unless you have proven the concept. When you apply a curious mindset around “which one will work?” versus “this must work!” it’s ok when not ALL of your ideas make it. This is also a great way to keep confidence levels high.
- When putting a business on growth you want to identify repeatable processes so you can capture them and automate them as much as possible. That’s how you get more done with fewer resources. Search for systems that can take over manual processes.
- Think twice as big and buy twice as big as you normally would. This is especially true for women. When I moved out of my home office that occupied the entire ground floor, I chose an office that was way too big at the time. My business was able to grow into it versus outgrowing the space only a year later.
The reason growth strategies and plans are so important is that you first identify the big picture of where you want to go to, and then you reverse-engineer the path. That is much simpler than taking one step at a time and figuring out where the path may lead. If you need a set of fresh eyes for your growth plan, please consider filling out an Uncovery Session application. Talking is good.
What are your growth challenges? Is there something holding you back—confidence, vision, resources? Please share. Let’s grow.
At her lowest point, Beate Chelette was $135,000 in debt, a single mother, and forced to leave her home. Only 18 months later, she sold her image licensing business to Bill Gates in a multi-million dollar deal. Chelette is a nationally known ‘gender decoder’ who has appeared in over 60 radio shows, respected speaker, career coach, consummate creative entrepreneur, and author of Happy Woman Happy World. Beate is also the founder of The Women’s Code, a unique guide to women leadership and personal and career success that offers a new code of conduct for today’s business, private, and digital worlds. Determined to build a community of women supporting each other, she took her life-changing formula documented it all in a book Brian Tracy calls “an amazing handbook for every woman who wants health, happiness, love and success!”
Through her corporate initiative “Why Acting Like a Girl Is Good For Business” she helps companies with gender diversification training, and to develop and retain women.
If you’d like to book Beate as a speaker on New Leadership Balance or Creative Entrepreneurship for your next event please connect with me.
