Category: Business Growth

Business Growth

The Evolution of the Entrepreneur – How to Shatter the Growth Ceiling

In today’s age, the barriers to entry for starting a business have definitely come down. However, growing and scaling that idea into a company is a different story. This is often the time when you’re working 14+ hour days, sacrificing time with friends and family, and experiencing the stress and sleepless nights of taking a risk for an unknown payoff. The initial launch comes with a larger than life to-do list to establish your company, to get customers coming through the door, and to find ways to scale quickly without going into too much debt in the process.

How entrepreneurs and small business owners handle the early growth is critical to their success. They must embrace the concept of leverage to actually move the business forward while still managing the day-to-day whirlwind. More on that a little later.

Historically, it is estimated that 96% of all small businesses fail within the first ten years. As they experience growth early on, the focus must quickly shift from launching the business to growing the business. And this growth comes with a host of growing pains, including how to:

Manage cash flow to invest in the business
Find and keep the right staff to help the business grow
Implement operational practices to make sure the day-to-day tasks are completed
Position the business in front of customers to drive sales
Juggle personal and family obligations while investing time in the business
Avoid burnout, anxiety, frustration, and the general highs and lows of being a new business owner

The natural progression of business growth from idea to startup to small business is full of challenges, coming from all directions – financial, business-related, and personal. As a business moves toward scale, it and the entrepreneur inevitably hit a hard growth ceiling. This is the place where another layer of people, systems and processes is required to experience sustainable growth. And, this is where finding a better way and using collaboration and leveraging the resources, people, and tools around you are essential.

There Is a Way to Overcome the Growth Pains

Despite most businesses calling it quits within the first few years, this trend is quickly changing, and more businesses are able to overcome the growth ceiling.

However, those who are successful must make BEHAVIORAL and MINDSET changes.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses are starting to understand the concept of leveraging time, money and resources…and execution. They are finding creative ways to study, learn from, and implement proven growth hacking and execution strategies to be able to work on their business, instead of only working in their business. The pains of finding affordable and efficient ways to grow are nothing new, so why not leverage the skills, strategies, and tools other companies have successfully used to break through the growth ceiling.

But, what does leverage really mean for the entrepreneur and small business owner? How can you generate more leads, close more sales, save time and money? You must have a strategy and a SYSTEM for how you approach it.

Here are just three of the many ways that you, the entrepreneur, can focus on leveraging those within your ecosystem to scale your business:

Leverage Your Money: Finding ways to get higher output without sacrificing your bottom line is a constant challenge, even for large companies. Taking advantage of free or inexpensive online tools, hiring freelancers, and establishing automated systems for day-to-day tasks can all be easy ways to make your money go further. The more money left in your business, the better able you are to grow your business. It’s true that it takes money to make money, but investing wisely in the ecosystem you build around your business will mean the difference between looking up at the growth ceiling, or standing above it and using it as a launchpad.

Here are a few examples of how you can leverage your money to grow your business.

Outsourcing content writing. If you don’t have great content to post and share (blogs, press releases, case studies, thought leadership guides), then you’re losing ground. Content is king, and it takes time, but it needs to get done and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. There are specialized online platforms you can tap into and get access to amazing writers for incredibly low cost.
Find a freelance graphic designer. Whether you need a new logo, infographics, brochures, or case studies formatted and designed, a freelance designer may charge only $25 to $100.
Free PR. Platforms such as Quuu.co that for as little as $25 to $75 can get your content pushed to all the major influencers. Or use a tool like prlog.org to submit your press releases for free and get the same results as with expensive solutions used by big companies (i.e. PR newswire).
Videos for less. If you know where to look, you can get high quality videos with professional scripting, professional voiceover, and eye-catching graphics, all for a fraction of what a local videographer may charge.
Explore data scraping. Instead of spending money to attend or exhibit at industry tradeshows, get a freelancer to scrape all the tradeshow websites for the conference or tradeshow speakers and capture all the influencers in your market. Then, you can hire a freelancer that specializes in social media marketing to connect with them on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Leverage Your Time: How much time are you really spending in your business versus working on growing your business? If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re in there every day, sun up to sundown, and may have limited time to plan, collaborate with potential business partners, and find new ways to take your business to the next level. Identifying and using online tools to manage not just your time but your business can help to free up your time to focus on the next steps. If you’re spending too many hours on a task, time that should be allocated for business growth brainstorming or execution, then consider outsourcing to get the work done, without restricting your time to devote on business growth.

Leading entrepreneurs are using these strategies to better use their time.

Hiring virtual assistants to keep up with competitors. Studying what others around you are doing takes significant time. But, hiring a virtual assistant who can do the online market research and compile a spreadsheet of your competitors information, even collecting their marketing materials, can save you time and money!
Using handwriting robots. In today’s digital world, a nice follow-up handwritten letter can do wonders in advancing a sale. Bond.co can create inexpensive handwritten letters and notes and send them to sales prospects, with a click of a button.
Leveraging online tools. If you want to do some cyber spying to learn what online marketing strategies are working for your competition, then free tools like Spyfu.com and help! You can quickly download all your competitor’s top performing keywords, see their Google Ads, and much more.

Maintain a Mindset of Execution: Build and Leverage the Network Around You. This includes how you manage and use your own skills and staff if you have them. If you’re spending 25% of your time working on your business and 75% of the time working in your business, then it’s time to shift your focus. The time you spend working ON your business is what moves it forward. Build a trusted and experienced team of freelancers and employees to take the operational tasks off of your plate, so you can shift from operations, and everything else under the sun, to strategy.

When you’re scaling the growth ceiling, consider these examples of how other entrepreneurs are building a network of resources.

Find your niche and stick to it. As the visionary behind the business, your time may be best spent networking, speaking to prospects, or creating a growth strategy. Figure out what you are the absolute best at doing in your business and free up your time to do this.
Be okay with letting go. Instead spending 4-5 hours writing content or trying to learn how to update your WordPress website, utilize someone who can do it quickly, and free up your time for what’s more important. Remember, always ask yourself, “Is this the best way for me to spend my time”. If the answer is “no” then find a freelancer to do the work. Your time is usually best spent closing a sale or developing a new market strategy.
Implement an “Operating System”. This is one of the most important elements! Having an operating system to bring discipline and accountability into your business is essential to establishing and executing goals as a team. Whether it is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), The Gazelle’s Scaling Up System (Rockefeller Habits), The 4 Disciplines of Execution or a similar program, the key is to find a system to use and implement. Keep in mind that you don’t have to invest in their full program to start. Each program has a website with free resources. You can also purchase a book on Amazon.com that summarizes their programs for less than $20.

The 21st century entrepreneur has many more tools at their disposal than their predecessors. Using a blend of creativity, data and execution resources to find paths of growth overlooked by others is helping small businesses around the world experience unprecedented growth. The key is how to unearth proven growth hacking strategies to maximize your time, get more out of your financial investment and create a self-sustaining network of people focused on growing your business. Leveraging the expertise of other entrepreneurs and growth hackers can be a great place to start, so look out for networking and workshop opportunities.

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Your Business is Dying: How to Work Less, Grow Your Business and Make More Money

“Bob” was writing code for a large infrastructure firm, earning a nice 6-figure salary. His quarterly job reviews showed him as the top developer in the building. An excellent employee.

But Bob had a secret that wasn’t unearthed by Verizon’s RISK team until 2013: He wasn’t doing any of the work. In fact, his secret went further. Not only was Bob not doing the work, he was also contracting with other companies, for multiple six-figure salaries, doing developing work for them as well. He was pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars. He only worked about 30 to 60 minutes a day.

All of it perfectly well coded and seamless.

To Request the Outsourcing Blueprint Click Here

In just a second you’ll discover the rest of Bob’s story-but first let’s use this as an illustration for your own business.

Most businesses today, online and off, are either stagnant or dying.

Yours may be one of them.

Many entrepreneurs start their journey with a bold plan – to work hard, build their business and then have the time and money to enjoy their success. Most also start as a “mom and pop” operation, with the founder/owner doing most of the work.

And that’s the problem.

When you are the key “doing” person in the business it has a limiting effect. First, it means your personal productivity will limit the growth of the business. You’ll hit a plateau based on how many leads you can develop, how many customers you can serve and how many products/services you can develop. Second, it means the only way to “grow” your business is to work longer, not take time off, and scramble every day.
Once you hit your limit, your business plateaus or even dies. You can’t “scale” your business beyond a few thousand customers.

Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you are there.

Grab a cup of coffee and take 4 minutes to read this post. As you read it, you will discover four simple steps to freeing up your time, working less and making your business not just more profitable but truly scalable.

You’ll also see what happened to Bob…

You can grab your guide and video tutorial by clicking here or on the button below.

Step 1: Identify Tasks to Outsource or Automate in Your Business

There are some tasks ONLY you can do. Those are the ones you should focus on to grow your business.

Chances are, you are doing many things other people can do for you while not routinely getting done the tasks that truly matter in your business. In fact, most people’s psychology tricks them into thinking “getting things done” is valuable. “Getting things done” is good – but only if they are the right things.

Bob may or may not have been a great developer. We’ll never know. What we do know is this: He was able to create code that was the best in the building. He just didn’t do it himself. (More on this in a minute.)

Bob’s experience brings us to another point our egos often cause us to miss: Some of the things we’re doing can actually be done BETTER by someone else.

Here are the things you MUST focus your own time on to smash through growth barriers and allow your business to become truly successful and scalable:

Long-term strategy
Communicating your vision to your team, your prospects and customers.
Evaluating key metrics and planning adjustments.

That’s it. What I have found in working with hundreds of entrepreneurs is most people spend little or no time on these key elements because they are so busy scrambling to find customers, create valuable customer experiences, get the “day to day” fires put out.

Maybe you have experienced or are experiencing that same treadmill in your own business. (In just a minute I’ll give you a free tool to help you identify the tasks you can easily automate or outsource to get you off that treadmill.)

Step 2: Leverage the Right Tools for the Job

Now that you accept the need to focus on the “right” tasks rather than just “urgent” tasks, the next step is to figure out what resources are out there to get those tasks done.

Identify what automation tools are already out there to solve your problems.

If you have a problem to solve or a task to complete, chances are thousands and thousands of other business owners have the same problem. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Someone has either created automation to do that for you, or is willing to do that task for you for far less money than you might imagine.

The problem is we often don’t realize those tools are available.

Social media is the bane of many business owner’s existence.

Using social media well is important to build your brand, create customer loyalty, generate leads. It is also difficult to keep up with all the posting to all the platforms several times a day. Fortunately, there are several tools already created to do this automatically for you.

These tools can allow you to pre-load content, post it at specified times throughout the day and free up your time to do the “right” things in your business.

(To see which ones we use and recommend, click here to get our free “Top 10 Tools” white paper.)

On this blog we publish tools you can use, in categories, so you can see exactly what tools are available to solve your business needs.

There are some tasks an automated tool just can’t accomplish. For those you need people.

Identify what people are available to solve your problems.

The internet has been an amazing resource to build any business – online or off. It allows us to access resources from all over the world and get excellent work accomplished with people we’ve never met in real life. Take Bob, for example (more on how he did that in a minute.)

When you need a blog post written, graphic designs created, a project managed chances are you need physical people to get the job done. Not only are there skilled people ready and able to do the work for you, often better than you could accomplish yourself, there are websites designed just to help you find and manage those people remotely.

You may have heard of Fiverr.com. Fiverr allows you to get tasks completed for as little as $5 and almost always less than $50. You can use Fiverr to get everything done from photo manipulation, to graphic design, to lead generation, to videos. It’s amazing and cheap.

Another website we utilize to find and manage people is UpWork.com. UpWork allows you to not only identify skilled people with a proven track record, it gives you a management system allowing you to see exactly what your virtual freelancer is doing with their time.

Just about any task you can’t automate can be outsourced to a highly skilled freelancer somewhere in the world.
Now that you have the basics of how to find tools and people to get your work done, the next step is to create a way to manage them.

You can grab your guide and video tutorial by clicking here or on the button below.

Step 3: Create a Management System

In order for your business to organically grow while you spend time on the important things, you need to have a routine way to manage your tools and people.

Process Maps

A process map is a simple, step-by-step procedure for creating consistent quality. It identifies the steps an outsourcer needs to take to prepare and complete a task. It also includes “expected outcomes” meaning it defines what the “finished task” should look like.

If you are having an outsourcer prepare content, you need to make sure you identify the process you expect them to go through to create the content and what the content should be like once it is complete.

Often examples of content that meets the criteria can help show the freelancer exactly what they are “shooting for.”

Routine Evaluation

You also need to review the effectiveness of your tools and freelancers on a routine basis.

When you implement an automation – whether it is an email follow up routine for prospects, a social media automatic posting routine, a customer “thank you” letter – you need to routinely either weekly or monthly evaluate whether it is working well or not. Many people miss this step with automation tools.

Some questions to ask:

Are these emails being opened by our prospects/customers? Is the open rate growing, declining or stagnant?
Are people engaging with social media posts? Are they commenting?
Is our social media “footprint” growing with followers?
Are our social media posts being shared?
Are our videos being viewed and shared?
Are customers becoming repeat and high value customers?

You also want to address routine follow up with your freelancers.

Initially you will want to follow up on their work immediately with both positive and adjustment feedback. They need to know the things they are doing right, and be reinforced with it, as well as things they need to correct.

On a routine basis you or someone on your team need to evaluate the work. This might be as it is created or, in the case of things like content, it might be a weekly or monthly review. Some things to consider:

Affirm the things they are doing well.
Evaluate the things that aren’t up to expectation and ask: Is this because the process isn’t working? The expectations aren’t clear or reasonable? The freelancer doesn’t have the skills?
Correct the work needing correcting.

Once you have the three above steps completed, now comes the fourth.

You can grab your guide and video tutorial by clicking here or on the button below.

Step 4: Measure, Refine, Repeat

Our businesses are a reflection of what we do routinely. Sure, once in awhile we hit a homerun, land a huge client, get a huge order. Over the long haul it is the single base hits that win the game.

In your business there should be four regular routines:

Measuring key metrics.
Meeting with key people (on a routine but not excessive basis).
Keeping aware of new resources.
Making adjustments to stay true to your long-term strategy.

Now back to Bob…

Bob was without a doubt an imaginative and innovative automater/outsourcer. Unfortunately, he also decided to hire programmers in China to do the work.

His company noticed many logins using his credentials to Chinese IP address. Hiring Verizon Security to investigate, they soon discovered Bob’s scheme.

You, however, can get all the benefits of automation and outsourcing without prison if you follow the four steps above. Your first step is to grab this free Outsourcing Blueprint to identify the areas where you can start outsourcing or automating now, freeing up time for you to do the truly important things in your business.

You can grab your guide and video tutorial by clicking here or on the button below.

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