As a small business owner (or even a large business owner) you may be interested to know that there are 4 surefire ways to grow your business.

These simple ways are detailed below, although when you read them you may think that they are obvious with just small improvements to any or all of then you should find your turnover and profits increasing.

Increase the number of customers of the type that you would like to have

Every business has two types of customers, those that you like to have and those that you could do without.  The first group order regularly, pay on time, are pleasant to deal with and order items or services that you make a profit on.  The second group may only order once in a blue moon, take for ever to pay their bills, are a pain to deal with (maybe needing more support or generally being unpleasant) and when their order comes in you groan (possibly the order is the minimum to get them free postage, or they ask for something special with every order). 

Increasing the number of customers that you like to have means that one or more of the following is likely to happen :-

•  you improve your cash flow because the customer pays earlier
• you make a larger profit as they are ordering items or services that generate a greater profit for you
• you shift more stock allowing you to get a better price from your supplier

Increase the frequency that you deal with your customers

Increasing the frequency that you deal with your customers can be a little more difficult to achieve but if you have customers that only order from you every 6 months why not contact them after 4 months?  If you can get an order from them and “convert” them to every 4 months it means that you have an extra order a year from them, similarly if you have a customer that orders every 3 months try contacting them after 2 months and so on.  The contact can be to send them a special offer (everyone loves a bargain) or just an update to tell them about new items or services, for example the author uses ebay to buy odd bits and pieces and one of his favourite sellers on there sends an email out once a month about new items that they have listed, this often results in another order.

Increase the average value of each transaction

Increasing the average value of each transaction will increase your turnover (and if you are selling items at a profit it will increase your profit – see our pricing your products article).    The obvious, but counter-productive, way to do this is to increase your prices but why not look at what the typical customer orders and see if you can increase the value some other way.  I am sure that you have seen online stores that say “other customers that brought this also brought…” or that you have been into stores like PC World, Comets, Currys etc and been asked if you need batteries or want to take out breakdown cover for the item that you have just brought – all of these are valid ways of increasing the value of each transaction.

Improve your efficiency

There can be many ways to improve your efficiency as a business for example :-

• planning delivery routes a little better and thus reducing the number of miles that you drive
• making sure that staff are on hand to take orders during the busy times of the day (have you ever queued at a bank or post office at lunchtime for example)
• ensuring that staff don’t spend time on sites such as facebook etc when they should be working
• making sure that the phone is answered within 3 rings rather than left to ring for minutes at a time
• use the phone to contact customers rather than spending time travelling to them – although it is nice to get out and meet customers once in a while as people like to be able to picture a face when they are on the phone for example.

As you can see from the short list above, efficiency covers many elements of the business – take a look at everything that you do and think “how can I improve this or make it better for our customers” – even small improvements can mount up over the year (take the reducing the number of miles driven as an example – if you can save even a couple of miles a day that is 10 miles a week or around 500 miles a year, if your delivery vehicle gets 25 miles per gallon that is 20 gallons of fuel that you have saved and at today’s prices that amounts to nearly £150 of pure profit – not much I know but it is still profit that you would not have had).

And finally…

There is no need to aim for big improvements on any of these four ways to grow your business, if you are old enough (or watch old tv programmes) you may remember Frank Spencers’ saying in “Some Mothers Do Have Them” – if you adopt this saying in your own business life then you can watch  your profits grow.  Oh, the saying…  “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”