Business Growth Checklist
Find the fastest revenue by spotting what you already do unpaid.
By James Schramko
What are you doing and not getting paid for?
When assessing for growth, you want to know, how can you make money really, really quickly? So the first point you'd look at is, what are you currently doing in your business for your clients that you're not getting paid for?
This might be something outside the scope of your service, or something you've added on as goodwill, a report, perhaps, leads, an audit, that provides significant value for free. Might people not be wiling to pay for that?
Where are you undervaluing your business?
How much is your client likely to make if the solution you provide is just half the success you think it will be? $300,000? $400,000? If you're charging $5,000 you're seriously selling yourself short. At least 10 percent of the projected value is a fair price to ask.
Who are the wrong clients for you?
Who are the clients you shouldn't be working for?
Do an analysis. Who are the clients you love working for and who love working with you? Which clients bring you the most profit?
Then look at: which clients take up too much time while making you zero profit? Which clients make you wonder all the time what you're doing wrong? Who among your clients is just a misery to work with?
Based on the first two steps of this framework, craft a new offer you can show to your best clients.
Then try to move your problem clients into a better situation, by maybe charging them more or getting them to play by your rules, or if all else fails, referring them to someone else.
What does your market actually want?
Look at the products or services that are actually your best sellers, and are what your market actually wants.
It's not about what you want to sell, but what actually sells. See which of your offerings people are actually paying for, then double down on that.
Address a real problem
A lot of businesses try to sell a product by creating or magnifying a problem they can solve. The real growth potential, however, whether in B2B or B2C, is in targeting an existing dilemma that is top of mind for customers.
Know, really know, your numbers
If you don't know where you're making money and where you're losing it, you can't really expect your business to grow. For a good grasp of your numbers, there are two sides you want to look at:
The business perspective
What do your cash flow and profitability look like? What expenses do you have coming down the pipeline? Talk with your accountant about that information.
The marketing perspective
How much have you spent on marketing? Has it been consistent spend? Know your key targets, whether it's leads or people to an email list. Know your cost per acquisition, and your customer lifetime value and lifetime profit.
Test, test, test
If you could determine what ads, what emails, what marketing campaigns worked best, and could then scale that, imagine the potential for growth. The way you find out is through split testing as fast as you can.
Note: of every 10 campaigns that go to market, likely just two or three will have a great result. But that's the goal of testing, to find the winners. And once you have those winners, you can double or triple down on them and reap the rewards.
Not too, you need a certain amount of volume for your testing to mean anything. Twenty cold emails over the course of three months is nothing. Think a thousand emails or more.
Do the unsexy stuff and do it well
If you do the right things over the long term, however boring and uninteresting they seem, and do them well, you've got the makings of a fast-growing business. If your offer works, if it gets results for your clients, look at refining it versus jumping into some new shiny venture.
Pick one channel and maximize
There's a lot of noise in the advertising space. One way to stand out and to drive growth is to choose a marketing medium that gets straight through to your ideal end user. Focus on that one medium, cold emails for instance, and maximize till people have got to notice.
When the time comes, get out of your own way
A business can grow to a point where senior management roles - a general manager, chief of staff, chief financial officer, integrator, chief operations person - are necessary and appropriate. And it's up to the founder to recognize that and get out of their own way. It's a matter of recognizing one's own limitations and opening the way for someone else perhaps more qualified to further the growth of the business.
Do things in the correct order. Fix, then scale
There's no point scaling a broken business. When you've sorted out parts one to four, you can already expect extra revenue to come in. Then you can think about marketing and getting more people to buy what you have.