How To Grow Your Business Into A Profitable Enterprise

Owning a business is rewarding when you’re making a profit. However, not all businesses succeed, in fact, most will fail within the first five years. If you feel your business is ready to expand, but you’re unsure how to do this, this expert guide will give you the key tips on how you can grow your business into a profitable enterprise. Let’s get started.

Best Tips To Grow Your Business Towards Success

1. Identify Strengths and Weaknesses

In order to grow your business, you need to first understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses. Your business strengths are those qualities that drive clients to buy from you over and over again. Many business owners have a feel for what their business strengths may be, but actually asking your customers why they buy from you may provide some insight into qualities and characteristics you had perhaps taken for granted, but are in fact greatly appreciated by your customers. This may present the opportunity to highlight and promote these qualities in your marketing to attract similarly like-minded customers.

A customer satisfaction survey can also be useful in identifying weaknesses, or areas for improvement that you hadn’t previously considered. Often business owners are too busy running the business to stand back and look at their business objectively.  You may find that the loyal customers are your greatest advocates and will offer suggestions for improvement if you ask.  Don’t be afraid of negative feedback.  This presents a valuable opportunity to make improvements, increase customer satisfaction and boost your profitability.  Simply asking your clients for feedback shows that you care about your business and what they think.

Weaknesses, if left unresolved can deteriorate your client relationships and negatively affect your profitability. So it’s important to regularly gauge your clients’ perceptions of your business and your service otherwise you may find that client retention begins to fall away.

By taking the time to identify and implement strategies on how you can improve your strengths and weaknesses, you’ll be able to improve the profitability of your enterprise as you grow and expand.

You can identify strengths and weaknesses in your business by answering these key questions:

• Is there something holding you back from expanding?
• How are you performing against your competition?
• Have you hired skilled staff members?
• Have you partnered with a reliable supply chain?
• Are your products and services competitively priced?
• Will expansion affect your current operations?
• Are there ways you can reduce your expenses?
• Can you improve your business performance?

Once you have a baseline of your existing strengths and weaknesses you can then begin building your long-term business strategy.

2. Create A Long Term Business Strategy

The creation of a long-term business strategy goes a long way in helping to grow your business into a profitable enterprise. Your business strategy should include the following:

• What are the overall goals/objectives of your business?
• What do you want your turnover to be in the next 2 to 3 years?
• What resources, infrastructure and distribution channels do you need to achieve these goals?
• What revenue, profits and expenses are you currently achieving?
• Who is your target market?
• Which marketing channels work best to engage your consumers more?
• What is your competition doing that you can do better?
• What work ethics do your employees have and can it be improved for better customer service?
• What obstacles might you experience along with your journey towards business growth?

3. Expand On Your Current Business Idea

If your business is currently making a profit, but you’d like to take it to the next level, then it may be time to work out ways you can expand upon your current business idea. Some ways you can start to expand your business, if you have the funds to do so and you’ve researched your market to see whether the expansion will be profitable, include:

• Opening another store location in another town, state or country.
• Offer your business as a franchise or opportunity to others.
• Build partnerships or alliances with other business owners to help improve growth and profits.
• Improve the diversity of your enterprise by offering a diverse range of products/services in addition to your current offering.
• Target more market niches in your industry. If you’re selling children’s clothing, consider selling children’s shoes, accessories or other complementary items.
• Partner with another business to help with the distribution of your product line.
• Consider adding an online store to your website to increase sales.

Conclusion

Growing your business into a profitable enterprise is all about analysing what you have, creating the foundation and steps to take you to the next level, and to improve on your idea with the best possible outcome in mind after doing your research. Are you ready to run a profitable business enterprise?

Steven McMeechan
Steven McMeechan is a strategic marketing and communications specialist with over twenty years’ experience in senior marketing management roles across a range of industries including Information Technology and Financial Services. He works for Capstone Financial Planning and lives in Melbourne Australia.