Three Business Growth Strategies for Business Owners

In this post, I’m going to share my top three tips for growing your business. I'll also include a few practices that you can start applying to your business today.

Know What You’re Good At and What You’re Not Good At

This number one thing is something every entrepreneur knows, but not many take advantage of. It's just knowing what you're good at and what you're not good at. What are the things that you enjoy and that really move the needle for your business?

Action step: Identify your $1,000 per hour tasks, and also identify the $10 per hour tasks for you. If you’re not sure what that means, or how to do this, click here to view another video I recorded with more information on how to specifically find those exact high-value tasks and then low-value tasks.

Once you have a list of these different types of tasks, find someone who could take over the lower-value tasks. If you can't afford a full-time person, try this: track the time that you spent on low-value tasks for a week. Add it up, and then ask yourself: can a part-time person, or maybe be a project-based hire, take over some of these tasks? And, if you're worried about the time that it takes to train them, or maybe the worry that you'll hire someone, and then they'll leave, or you'll have to let them go, check out my video on how to create a process easily. Once you create the process, you can just give it to the new hire and they can train themselves. You and I both know that hiring someone to free up your valuable time is one of the best things that you can do to grow your business and improve your life.

What Area of Your Business Should You Focus on Next?

Once you’ve freed up some of your time by delegating your low-value tasks, find out the area of the business that you need to focus the most time on next. The way to do that is by first identifying the six core pillars of your business:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Product/Service
• Operations
• Finance
• People

Write all of these out in columns, and then underneath each one, write the problems that exist. Say, for marketing, it could be that you’re only getting one intro call per month. Or, for sales, maybe only one out of five people end up moving from prospect to client. (By the way, if you want to increase the number of prospects that turn into lifelong clients, check out the Advisor Value Formula.)

So, take a few minutes and write out all of the problems that come to mind under each of the core pillars. Then decide which one of the problems you’re going to focus on for the next 30 days.

If you’re not sure which issue is most important, consider the business hierarchy of needs. You need to build up the bottom of the pyramid and make sure the foundation is strong before you move to the next level. Here’s what I mean:

The bottom of the pyramid are the people coming in to become clients, so that’s marketing and sales. Once you have that figured out and there is a consistent flow of new business or new clients, the next thing to make sure you’re doing correctly is finance. If you have revenue coming in but you’re not managing it effectively, then the business isn’t going to last very long. The third priority is operations. And here’s an example to demonstrate the reason why it is in this order: if you spend the next 30 days creating an in-depth systems manual, but don’t have any prospective clients coming in to your business, it's going to be a waste of your time. If there’s no consistent or repeatable revenue, those perfect systems aren’t going to do you much good.

End Your Workday

This third strategy has to do with the fact that many advisors, or people in business for themselves, frequently have a hard time ending their workday when there's so much more to get done. We're measuring ourselves to this future goal or ideal that we're aiming for. And for me, it’s easy to keep looking ahead at the goal off in the future and instead of recognizing how far I have come since I started pursuing this goal, I keep focusing on how far I still have to go. And that gap that we feel between where we are and where we want to be can sometimes lead to an imbalance in other areas of our life, such as family, fitness, or faith.

With that in mind, this tip is just a two-minute exercise to try out at the end of the day. And it'll help you feel happier with ending your day so that you can present as you transition into family life or to friend life or whatever it might be.

At the end of the day, ask yourself: what progress did I make today that made today better than yesterday? Focus your answer on three wins or three things that you accomplished. That's progress. You can feel good about that. Then, write down three things you can do tomorrow that will make tomorrow better than today.

Doing this quick exercise will help you to wrap up the day nicely, have a plan for tomorrow, and make sure that you’re always focusing on the most important things to grow your business. For more details about this practice and how it’s made a huge impact on my day, check out my video called Gap in the Gain.