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4 ways to grow your business

FLB recognise that there are only 4 fundamental ways to grow your business!

1) Increase the number of customers (of the type you want)

2) Increase the transaction frequency

3) Increase the transaction value or 'average sale'

4) Increase the effectiveness of each process in your business

If you're at all sceptical about whether there really are just 4 ways - think of a strategy to grow your business - any strategy - and you'll find it falls under one of these 4 areas.

These 4 ways are most powerful when applied together as part of your overall strategy. Many business owners make the mistake of focusing on just one of these 4 ways, and miss out on significant growth opportunities as a result. By applying all 4 ways to grow your business, you'll achieve synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

When you look at profit from this perspective, you can immediately see that your overall business strategy and internal operating systems must focus on these 4 things.

By tweaking the values relating to these 4 profit drivers for your business, we can help you identify a potential profit improvement for your business.

Increase the number of customers (of the type you want)

If you're like most business owners your primary focus will be to grow your business - winning new customers. You may have often thought "I need more leads," "I've got to get more inquiries," or "If I could just get the phone to ring and more people to walk through the door we'd be doing really well," and so you invest heavily in advertising for instance.

Focusing on this way to grow your business is often far more expensive and the least leveraged. It costs up to 6 times more to win a new customer than it does to have an existing client do more work with you and that directly affects your profit potential.

The team at FLB will work with you to find other leveraged ways of winning new customers and suggest how to improve the advertising you are doing. We will also work with you on the 3 remaining ways to grow your business so you're maximizing all of your opportunities rather than focusing on just one way to grow.

Increase the transaction frequency

Increasing the transaction frequency or the number of times someone deals with you is an important step to increasing your profitability. In fact, some say this second way is the most important of all. It's a fancy definition of loyalty, or customer retention, which in and of itself is closely related to value.

To increase the transaction value, or 'average sale'

This may seem pretty obvious, however, few businesses realise its importance.

There are two fundamental ways to increase the average sale. First, by cross selling or up selling; both mean you encourage the customer to buy more. The team at FLB can advise you how do to this in a systematic fashion so it happens every time and adds value to the customer.

The second way to increase the average sale is to raise your prices. When you suggest raising prices to the average business person, they think you're crazy, but there are specific, workable strategies to make this happen.

Increase the effectiveness of each process in your business

The fourth way to grow your business is more of an all-encompassing strategy than the other three ways. Increasing the effectiveness of the way you do business is central to everything, but so few people work at it.

When you think about it, a business is nothing more than a group of people carrying out a variety of processes — the quality of the processes defines and determines the quality of the outcomes. Makes sense, doesn't it?

So going back to the example earlier of a business owner needing more leads, we might discover that in fact, the business doesn't need any more leads but rather needs to convert more of the ones they're already receiving! That's a sales process that needs improving.

The truth is that most people don't see their businesses as a series of processes. But that's exactly what they are, so we'll look at exactly what results your current processes are generating and see if we can't improve those!

FLB focus on working closely with all our clients to achieve growth - being mindful always of the four fundamentals!