6 Proven Growth Strategies for Entrepreneurs

When it comes to business, growth is not optional. Any startup or small business that wants to survive and continue being able to support both their company needs to make growth one of their major goals.

How can businesses and their entrepreneurs make this growth happen? There are many tried and true methods to expanding a business that require only a relatively small investment and planning beforehand.

Here are six of the most common methods that successful businesses use in order to impact their continued growth.

1: Extend the Reach of the Business’s Market

Many people equate business growth with business expansion. As such, expansion itself presents an excellent way to grow your business by actually making it wider spread and giving it a longer reach.

This may mean opening new stores or kiosks or offices in new locations. It may also mean taking business online, if it isn’t already, to provide a virtual location that customers anywhere can access. The more places your business is, the more customers will be able to access it, and the more customers you’ll ultimately get.

2: Capitalize on a Small but Unmet Need

Extending your market does not have to mean extending to every single possible customer. Instead, why not focus on paying attention to what customers are looking for but not finding anywhere else?

Niche markets are excellent and often overlooked business opportunities. These are groups of potential customers that are narrowly defined but who are not being adequately catered to by any other business options. By making their unmet needs a specialty of your company, you can tap into a surprisingly deep well of growth through this small but consistent audience.

3: Seek Out Referrals

One simple yet highly effective way to generate new customers for a business is to leverage the approval of existing customers. Asking satisfied customers for business referrals is a great method of bringing in new business with little to no effort.

The key here is to actually ask. You can’t just assume that a customer who enjoys your business is going to go out and spread the word for you. Some of them will, and some of them might share new potential customer ideas on their own, but most won’t bother unless prompted. So the next time your business finishes a successful sale or job, take a moment to ask the customer if they know anyone else who might need your company’s services.

4: Participate in a Trade Show

Trade shows are an excellent way for a company to reach out to audiences with an interest in their products or services already guaranteed. The right trade show can prove to be a powerful tool when it comes to increasing your business. The main thing is to find the trade show that provides the best match for your company and participate in it to the best of your business’s ability.

Internal Methods of Business Growth

Not all business growth is dependent upon going out into the market and bringing in more customers. Businesses can also grow and become more successful with the following methods that focus more on the actions of the company itself rather than its customers.

5: Innovate and Diversify

As a business, it’s important to make sure that you’re exploring the full scope of what your existing products and services have to offer. If you discover another use for your product that you hadn’t first considered, for example, then you can significantly widen your consumer base with no extra actual work beyond a modification of advertising.

In addition, a small amount of diversification into a closely related service or product can also work wonders for business growth. The key here is to look at your established market and see what options exist right next door to them. For example, if your business sells snowboards during the winter, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to also sell skateboards during warmer seasons. Doing so would significantly broaden your appeal as well as the opportunity for increased sales.

6: Contain Existing Costs

Business growth means the growth of the business’s bottom line more than anything. You can do this by bringing in more profits, or you can do this by expending fewer costs. The latter method requires a company to take actions such as improving the turnover of their inventory or liquidating their products that are not as cost-effective. This way, you can make your business more successful through efficiency rather than expansion.