How to Grow Your Small Business

In the United States, there are nearly 30 million small businesses that hire 47.8% of the country’s workforce. These small companies are crucial in providing employment, especially in smaller communities where job opportunities are a lot more limited.

Anyone can start a business and all it takes is an idea, but the difficult part is to grow that business. There are a few easy ways to make that happen and trying to rush the growth of a company could only make it fail; however, you can do something to support the growth and give your company a better likelihood of being successful.

DCTC-Business-Entrepreneur” by Dakota County Technical College (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How to Hire New People

To grow your sales or the number of retail locations for your business, you’re probably going to need to hire some new people. When the business gets to a certain size you’re going to need a hierarchy and different departments so everything runs smoothly.

However, when doing this you shouldn’t just look for people who have the same skills as you do. If you are brilliant at making sales, you aren’t adding to the company by hiring someone who can also spin gold out of words on a page. What you should be doing is looking at your weaknesses and hire specialists for those areas. If your customer service skills are more likely to get someone to put the phone down on you than they are to get a good review, then that’s a big area that you should try to hire for.

If you’ve been working on your business idea for a long time then it won’t be easy to see these weaknesses and it’s why many business owners turn to hiring managers. Hiring managers can help you decide which skills you should be hiring for and what sort of questions to ask in the hiring process.

Use Insurance as a Safety Blanket

Having an idea of how to grow your business is one thing, but you also need to grow in the right way. If you focus on making the business bigger, you may miss some important issues that could potentially bring your small business down. That’s why it’s important for small businesses to put a safety blanket in place before they start to grow.

One safety net that small businesses will want to get is a business insurance policy to protect them against property damage, vehicle collisions, and damage done by faulty work. It only takes one claim to bring a business down but business insurance will support you if you have an upset customer or work hasn’t been done right. It also means that you can grow without having to fear an expensive lawsuit. Lawsuits cost small businesses $105 billion a year, says the United States Chamber of Commerce, and you don’t want to add to that number.

Others are to make sure that your workers are happy and not risk everything on the new product or service. If your workers are motivated then this will only benefit the company and they are more likely to contribute to improving the new idea, whereas, a workforce with low morale is likely to be apathetic at best. By not investing everything into your new idea, it also ensures that there are funds to pay your worker’s wages if the new product or service isn’t a success.

Create Customer Loyalty

Customer journey with touchpoints” by Nick Nijhuis (CC BY-SA 4.0)

When growing your small business, getting new customers can be incredibly expensive, whatever goods or services you offer. An article about finding new customers reveals that in the travel industry it can cost $7 to get a new customer, but in technology it can cost $395.

To save money, you can create customer loyalty so that they continue to return to your business, potentially in areas they didn’t come for initially. Are there any other things that they would like to buy from you? Can you add more features to what they pay for? Try putting these questions to your customers to see what they say, it could potentially save you thousands of dollars.

Growing a business is rarely easy and millions of people in the US will all be trying to make their companies bigger. Using these suggestions, you can be part of the group that does so successfully.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.