Driving Business Growth

One core aspect of scaling your business and maximizing its value, is to create predictable growth. Predictable growth focuses on selling to your core clients and potential clients to build customer loyalty and drive repeat business. To help you create predictable growth in your business, we encourage you to focus on the following two strategies: 

• Value Capture: Businesses capture value by understanding their core clients and managing the risks associated with selling to these clients. To help business owners better understand their core clients, we encourage them to ask questions such as questions ‘are we in the right market?’ and ‘do we have the right customers?’ 

Once you understand your core client base, you can better manage the risks associated with attracting and selling to these clients. Risks we encourage business owners to monitor include the industry where they operate, the internal operational, human resources and financial strategy of the firm, and local socioeconomic issues. 

• Value Creation: Capturing value is about asking the right questions so you can position yourself to create value by implementing a well thought out and well communicated strategy. A combination of captured value and proactive marketing leads to cash inflow, which increases your revenue and the value of your business. As long as your net cash flow is increasing enough to support your growth strategy, you will be in a position to sustainably grow without having to take on too much debt. 

Below is a list of the key drivers we typically look at when helping a business owner to create a predictable growth strategy and maximize the value of their firm:

• Adequate Planning: When you fail to plan, you plan to fail. One of the first key drivers of growth is having a business continuity plan that focuses on how you can create predictable growth and how you can mitigate risks to that growth.  
• Understand Your Market: It is important to understand your market size and your company’s ability to scale quickly within that market.
• Branding and Product/Service Differentiation: Your products/services should enable you to gain a competitive advantage within your market by helping current and potential customers understand who you are and what you do. 
• Create a Marketing Plan: People confuse branding and marketing. Branding is who you are while marketing is how and where you tell the stories about your brand. Know how to differentiate the two.
• Efficient Budgeting and Cash Flow Forecasting: Updating your budgeting through the year can help you to better predict revenues and profits based on the ongoing value capture and value creation process.
• Human Resources: Hiring the right people will help ensure your business meets its targets faster. This includes coming up with good compensation packages and opportunities for employee education.  Properly educating employees to uphold the values of your business can differentiate you from your competitors.
• Performance: Set and clearly communicate performance goals to all staff; this includes gathering feedback from your staff on an ongoing basis so you can update their performance goals to make sure they are truly motivated. Then, make sure to allocate the right financial and training resources to help your employees achieve these performance goals.