How to Grow Your Business (2023)

If you have more business than you can handle, it’s probably time to grow. Of course, sudden spikes in sales aren’t necessarily an indicator that demand is high — this could just be a fluke. So make sure you consistently have more demand than you can supply. Do they want different products that you could be offering? Interview your customers. Survey them about satisfaction, interest in new products and overall feedback about your business. Then look for patterns in the responses you get. If your customers want more of your product, faster delivery or additional services, that’s a good sign.

Decided it’s time to take the next step? Here are a few strategies you could try.

“To understand what people really want, you have to find out what their real challenges are,” said Ramit Sethi, the author of the New York Times best seller, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” and founder of Growth Lab, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and grow online businesses. Figure out what made your current customers want to buy your product. This will help you pinpoint what you’re doing right, and what marketing strategies might be a waste of time. Mr. Sethi interviews tens of thousands of his own customers, who are also business owners, to find their pain points and advises them to do the same He asks the following questions:

• Tell us about your day. What are the best parts? What are the hardest parts?
• Have you bought something like this before?
• If you could wave a magic wand, what would success look like?

If your company serves other businesses (known as B2B), ask about their business and revenue goals. You might conduct these interviews over the phone or via email. Choose a wide swath of customers: ones you interact with all the time and ones that only use your business once in a while. Either way, the interview process can help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t in your marketing.

Many entrepreneurs find initial success copying a competitor’s business model. If you want your business to grow however, you’ll have to set it apart and find your unique brand identity. Customer interviews can come in handy with this, too.

Try it: Create an avatar for your target customer. Write a before and after description for him or her — that is, a quick bio of who they are before and after purchasing your product or using your business. You may have done this when you first launched, but it’s important to update this avatar as your business expands.

Even if you don’t have an online business, expanding your online brand presence is crucial to getting your product in front of more eyes, especially if your product sells directly to consumers. Some strategies you might consider:

• Post content consistently. Whether you share content via a blog, newsletter or Twitter account, posting regularly will help your followers stay interested and engaged with your brand. Use tools like Hootsuite and IFTTT to schedule posts and shares.
• Stay true to your brand identity. Whichever online platform you use to promote your business, make sure the content you post is consistent to your brand’s identity. For example, if your brand is about simplicity and minimalism, you probably don’t want to post something about the best Black Friday deals.
• Run a promotion. Generate buzz around your business with a giveaway or contest. For example, Lonely Planet uses Instagram to encourage users to tag their travel photos for a chance to be featured on the Lonely Planet page. This expands their reach to other audiences and gets users to advertise Lonely Planet at no cost to the brand.

There’s no shortage of quick marketing “hacks” you can play with. Split testing, also called A/B testing, helps you test out these strategies to see what works best. For example, you could test how well a green “buy now” button works on converting customers on your website versus a yellow one. Some other things you could split test:

• Email subject lines: Which one has a higher open rate?
• Web page titles: Which one gets more clicks?
• Days you post to social media: Which day gets more engagement?

Chances are, the marketing tools you already use in your business give you the option to split test. HubSpot, ConvertKit and Google Ads, all offer this option. Play around and see what works.

The speed at which your business operates will make a big difference to your bottom line. “The most important thing for a startup entrepreneur is speed,” said Patrick Bet-David, a former financial adviser and current C.E.O. of PHP Agency, Inc, an insurance agency .

“The faster you move, the sooner you can grow your business, ” he said. There are four operating speeds to think about:

Your business functioning speed is how quickly the basic, day-to-day functions of your business get done. “The more support you have, the stronger your functioning speed,” Mr. Bet-David said. Typically, the bigger your team, the faster your functioning speed.

Example: You sell a physical product on Etsy and handle all the tasks associated with your business on your own. You create the product, manage social media, ship everything out and respond to customer feedback. You could hire an assistant to ship products and manage social media, and your business now functions much faster.

This doesn’t always mean hiring people, though. If your Wi-Fi is painfully slow, for example, switching Internet providers may increase your functioning speed a lot.

Your processing speed is how long it takes to get the product to the customer. “In real estate, this would be the time it takes to go from ‘I want to buy a home’ to actually closing on the home,” said Mr. Bet-David.

Example: You have a financial consulting business. When you get a new client, you spend days emailing each other back and forth to schedule your consulting calls. Use an online scheduler like Calendy or Square to eliminate the back and forth. Your client can now get their sessions scheduled in one step.

To increase this speed, focus on efficiency. Make a list of all the steps involved in processing a sale in your business, then see if there’s anything that can be eliminated or combined. Look at tools like Zapier, Hootsuite and Hubspot for automating basic business tasks to increase this speed. For example, if you spend too much time dealing with customer returns, tools like Returnly can automate and expedite the process for you. Or maybe your invoicing system requires an extra step that you could cut to speed up the process.

Timing speed is about leveraging the right timing to grow your business. It involves looking for opportunities and getting comfortable taking a step back in order to take a few steps forward. This is a harder one to plan for, Mr. Bet-David said. “Intuitive people are good at it.”

Example: When gas prices were increasing in 2005, Mitsubishi took advantage of the timing and offered a year of free gas for new customers, given as a prepaid debit card. The cost of this incentive was minimal to them overall but increased their sales by 7.2 percent, reported Heinz marketing. Even better, it improved their brand perception.

To increase your timing speed, focus on opportunity and positioning. Look for pain points that customers might be struggling with at the moment and opportunities to solve those problems for them. If you’re planning to launch a marketing campaign for your product, think about the best time to do this.

Expansion speed is knowing the next move you need to make in your business and when you need to make that move. But control your ambitions, Mr. Bet-David warned. “A company that’s trying to grow too fast is worse than a company growing too slow.” Expansion speed is less about expanding in the moment, and more about knowing when it’s time to expand.

Example: You have a furniture rental business for real estate staging. It’s doing well, but you’ve noticed your customers request quite a bit of children’s furniture, a category for which you don’t have much inventory. After interviewing your customers and researching their needs, you decide you’ll expand your business and invest in children's furnishings to rent. You’ll do this next year, when business profits are on schedule to increase 8 percent.

To increase expansion speed, focus on strategy and thinking ahead. “Most entrepreneurs have no idea who their ideal customer is,” Mr. Bet-David said. “You have to figure out who’s in your niche, then figure out where your market is.” Again, this comes down to knowing where your customers live, where they hang out online and what they’re searching for. Tools like Google Keywords, Google Trends, Quantcast and Market Samurai can help with this. You can also interview and poll your existing customers. What are their additional needs?

You probably already know the basics of launching a new product: It starts with research. “When you discover that nobody actually wants the product you spent thousands of dollars and months creating, it’s a huge blow,” said Mr. Sethi. To prevent this, research customer data that already exists for your offering. Let’s say you have a successful money-saving app and you’re planning to expand it to investing. Research online investing communities and read reviews for books on investing. What are customers saying? What are the problems they need to solve? Some other areas you might want to research:

• Where your customers live, where they spend time online, and what they’re searching for. Use tools like Google Keywords, Google Trends, Quantcast and Market Samurai to help with this.
• Competitors that offer similar products. What does their growth look like? What do their customer testimonials tell you?
• Interviews and polls with your existing customers. What are their additional needs?

“Having customer conversations tells you what related services or products your business can launch,” Ms. de Leon said. “It’s important to note that your focus will inevitably be split if you decide to launch a complimentary product or service.”

Before you go full force with this product, keep it simple. Start with a Minimum Viable Product (M.V.P.). This is a product that meets the bare minimum requirements to be launched. You don’t want to waste too much time building a complicated product that’s too hard to measure. Plus, you want to give your product room to grow, depending on customer feedback.

For example, let’s say you want to offer a new subscription model to your flower delivery service. You might be tempted to offer a handful of different arrangement options, schedules and price points customers can choose from. Instead, start simpler: A dozen roses for $39, delivered on the 15th of every month. If your customers respond well, you can build on this M.V.P. later. To launch your M.V.P., define the solution or benefit it offers, build its most basic features, then set up your sales channel, whether it’s your email list or a simple landing page with an ad campaign.

Upselling is getting your customers to buy add-on products, and cross-selling is getting them to buy entirely separate products that might still benefit them in some way. Many businesses cross-sell and upsell on a checkout page or in a follow-up email. Either way, the idea is the same: Get your existing customers to keep buying from you.

Keep a few things in mind when you’re doing this:

• Be upfront about the cost and additional value. If they’re already spending money, customers will be curious why they should spend more. Be clear about how much more they’ll need to spend. Tell them exactly what they’re getting from the sale.
• Show social proof. Use testimonial videos or blurbs from customers. If you don’t have this, use numbers or data about your business — maybe you’d like them to join 5,000 other customers who purchased additional services from you.
• Consider timing. Decide on the best time to offer an upsell. This might be after your customer reaches a milestone related to their original sale, or when seasons change or on a specific holiday. For example, if you’re a personal stylist, you might offer past customers new services during the fall or spring season, when wardrobes need refreshing.

How do you know when it’s time to hire a team in the first place? Here are some good indicators:

• You are turning down opportunities because you don’t have bandwidth.
• You’re working overtime.
• You turn down opportunities because you lack certain specialized skills.
• You can quantify the value of a new hire (i.e. you’ll spend $30,000 a year but earn $100,000 more in new business).

If you already have a team, it makes sense to expand when the current team is at or near capacity, Ms. de Leon said.

You may already know the specific role you need to hire. If not, then make a list of all the work you do in your business. From there, pinpoint tasks on the list that are a repeatable process that someone else can do. You’ll see the job description come together.

Hiring help will be most effective if these operations are already in place. “The quicker you start to realize that a business is just a process that you’ve gotten so good at that people pay you for it, the quicker you can see how to make it better,” Ms. de Leon said. “No matter what you're selling — a service, a product, an application — you’re ultimately selling your special process for solving a specific problem.”

When pulling together your team, you want to make sure you have the best people for the job. Look at an overlap of skills fit, character fit and culture fit, Ms. de Leon suggested. “Having the right skills is only part of finding the right person for your team. They need to be able to fit into the culture you’re creating at your company.”

Test new hires before bringing them on your team. If you’re looking for a detail-oriented person, give them a detailed task. If you’re looking for someone who works well under pressure, give them a task with a tight deadline. You can also suggest a trial run of 30 to 90 days to make sure both you and the potential new hire are happy.

As for finding people, go beyond job boards and tap your network. “Some of the best hires I’ve had were from people I knew or from meeting in a community,” Ms. de Leon said. “It’s hard to judge people by their resumes alone.”

When it comes time to interview potential hires, ask open-ended questions and leave enough time for them to talk. Of course, you’ll want to ask the obvious, general questions about past experience and greatest challenges. When you craft questions that are specific to the role and to your business, however, consider those three aforementioned traits: company culture, personal character and professional skills.

Of course, the goal of hiring a team is to make more money by focusing your efforts on the thing you’re best at while other people do everything else. “But here’s the big thing not a lot of people talk about,” said Ms. de Leon. “When you grow and you hire people, your job changes. You now have to manage another person or a group of people. You have to manage personalities and conflict and group dynamics.” Make sure this is a job you want to do and that you’re good at. Consider taking a basic managerial course to see if it’s something you would enjoy doing. You can find options on platforms like Coursera and Lynda.

“Otherwise there is really nothing wrong with not growing,” Ms. de Leon said. Indeed, growing too fast can be dangerous for your business. A report from Startup Genome Project, a research group, found that “premature scaling” is the top reason most startups fail. Growth is great, but sometimes the best thing you can do for your business is to allow it to thrive how it is. As Ms. de Leon added, “I hate growth for growth’s sake.”