5 tips that can take your small business to the next level
Personal Note: I talked about the things you can do as a small business owner to take your business to the next level. I have simplified things with vivid examples and I hope you get the hang of it. Rooting for you, mate!
Scaling your Small Business
As a small business owner, I know what you love best is to see your business growing. The more your brand grows, the more customers you have and more money in your pocket. Also, because you are a small business owner, it is understandable if you don’t have enough employees, capital, and goodwill, which means you need to be super effective to get things done.
As challenging as this is, I am sure you are finding your way around it because you are a small business owner that is strong and resilient.
To take your business to the next level, here are the things you should do.
5 things you can do to scale your Small Business
- Dedicate time to learning
As a small business owner, you don’t have access to many things, but you need to turn up for your business. A good way to do this is to prepare yourself for a life of learning.
Learn the new tricks in social media marketing, learn tools that can aid your business automation and growth. Has it not occurred to you before why you don’t sell enough and your competitor sells a lot is the tiniest details?
For example, she understands how effective Instagram reel is for a business person, and she is utilizing it well to drive engagement, foster customer retention, and get new clients while you, on the other hand, keep posting on your IG feeds without the use of correct hashtags or reels to give you more impressions.
Don’t rest on your oars. What worked yesterday may not work today, which is why you need to be learning over time to scale your business.
2. Focus on collaboration, not competition
Most small business owners have grown by collaborating with related businesses that complement theirs. Ideally, there is no need to compete where you can collaborate and gain market share. Since you don’t have the resources to scale your business, research, and work with someone who also needs you. This is a win-win situation for you both, and it guarantees more visibility and sales.
A photographer can collaborate with a model, makeup artist, jewelry vendor, and cloth seller for a photoshoot. The photographer’s work will be seen, and every other collaborative business will get the visibility they want too. When you compare it with everyone doing their thing separately, you will notice the cost will be higher, and the results will probably be less.
If you want to grow your business fast, instead of competing with those who can help you grow, collaborate with them.
3. Leverage on technology and digital tools
Small business owners have less budget for tools and innovations. Interestingly, there are several digital tools and technology for automation that can make a business easy to run for a small business owner.
We now have tons of free digital tools that have come to change the way things are done. For example, instead of paying for ads on local radio stations, you can simply advertise to a wider audience through social media. To make your operations easier, you can leverage ticketing tools that provide clients’ invoices and other functions to make transactions easier to record.
Instead of posting every day, you can use digital tools to schedule your posting while focusing on other aspects of your business. To scale your business fast, you need to move on to innovative ways of doing things, and interestingly, you don’t have to break the bank.
4. Understand your customer wants
In an era where thousands of small businesses offer the same service or product as you, one of the best ways to retain customers is to understand and satisfy their wants to the best of your ability.
There are different ways to do this. Always ask for feedback after completing an order or service. Create survey forms and ask them what they feel and how best they want to be satisfied. This might look bulky, but in the long run, you will be thankful for the steps. It will help you keep your customers loyal and make customer retention easy.
5. Learn to give freely in your offers
The human mind is wired selfishly. Virtually everyone wants to get something for free, even if they can pay for it. The action may look like a bad thing, but to you as a business owner, it could be an opportunity to increase sales by 100%.
Let’s say you sell 10 shirts every week normally. Add a free perfume oil to each shirt for the next week and see the magic that comes with the sales. Assuming you do x2 of your sales because people would love to smell nice alongside wearing their favorite shirt, that is a huge sales lift for you.
To them, it means not spending on the perfume oil and gives them some vague satisfaction that they have gained whereas you have gained numerously in sales, customer satisfaction, and more profits.
For every small business owner, you shouldn’t be satisfied with where you currently are. It is ideal to appreciate the journey so far, but it is equally important to keep dreaming.
To scale your small business to the next level, you need to learn as much as you can, try to understand what your customers want and how you can satisfy them. Collaborate with small businesses that can help you grow and shun any unnecessary competition. Create irresistible offers that will be a win-win for everyone, and lastly, leverage technology and digital tools to run your business effectively.
If you are able to take anything away from this, kindly follow my medium account as a way of thank you. @ibrahmkazeem
