CEO advice - how to continuously drive business growth and scale

To drive business growth there are two crucial factors to consider; one, you must successfully run your internal business. Two, you must successfully monitor and respond to external factors.

Growing your business is an exciting challenge and for any industry success comes from great customer service, continuous transformation, relevant products or services, a devoted community and talented team.

This article will summarise the effective approaches to better drive business growth and help your company continuously scale.

Be the disruptor – not the disrupted

Focus your attention on keeping your innovations sustainable ensuring your products and services are always competitive and on trend. Look at your existing offerings and identify ways you can modernise to match current consumer and business demands. Or maybe through your research you uncover a need to innovate with new offerings.

To develop a strong product innovation process, foster an internal space for creativity – encourage your team to speak up and suggest ideas, like the old saying goes ‘no idea is a bad idea.’ Also, start your creativity meetings by asking what pain points you are not addressing as a company rather than asking for new product or service ideas.

Your customers knows best

We all know the saying the customer is always right. But are you really listening? When starting a business any savvy owner would identify their buyers’ personas and centralise their offerings exactly around what they uncover as their wants and needs. However, as businesses successfully grow, listening to customers or even understanding their ever changing needs can be forgotten. Some ways to ‘listen’ to your customers can be through social channels, focus groups, a net promoter score system or survey after significant interactions and through general feedback. 

Don’t hold back on your business transformation

How your business operates could be another aspect your company needs to review. Rather than waiting for shifts in the external environment such as technology, behaviours or economics and then reacting, build a process that predicts change and transforms in a planned way.

Operations need to be agile so they can adapt quickly to changing circumstances to seize business opportunities as well as mitigate risks. Partnering with a firm such as Growth iQ, can help you with your business growth and transformation project.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

The famous Peter F. Drucker, the sometimes called inventor of modern management, had a signature phrase which is truly key to business growth - “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This could not be more accurate, without culture your company is starved of food for thought. It is important your culture helps your company grow instead of standing in its way.

Questions to ask yourself to ensure your culture is helping your growth: Have you enrolled your team in your vision, meaning they have an emotional and personal stake in the outcome? Does your culture reward learning from mistakes? Does your culture provide the support and/or learnings to drive the growth plan, meaning the opportunity to learn as you go or provide extra training?

Give back to the community

Not only does giving back create fulfilment and joy but it fosters a positive brand image. Some have reported that business owners who give back to the community tend to become more energetic, talented, and unafraid to take action when it comes to working on their own business. When giving back to the community we are also able to expand our skill set and develop new experiences that will benefit us and our employees.

There are various internal and external approaches that can assist with growth outside of sales. By focusing on consistent innovation of your offerings, your transformation model, culture and community you can help drive business growth and successfully scale. 

Get in touch with our Operational Excellence team who can help extend your business’ capabilities, implement improvements, and spur overall growth. Book a complimentary consult today.