Growing your business can be an uphill battle. There are many roadblocks to success – stiff competition, picky customers, funding crunches, market fluctuations, and staffing issues, among other things. Hard work and a competitive product or service aren’t enough to secure growth – you need a solid growth strategy that’s tailored to your unique business and present market conditions.

Below, Reliant Funding offers some best practices for growing your business:

Tailor your strategy to your specific growth stage

There are four stages of business growth, according to The Hartford: startup, growth, maturity, and renewal. The best way to grow your business will depend on the stage where your business is at. Startups need to focus on getting established; growth-stage businesses on expanding rapidly; mature businesses on securing their gains and avoiding stagnancy; and renewal-stage businesses on avoiding becoming obsolete.

Devise a growth strategy based on your current growth stage and financial situation. Be sure to set specific SMART goals after calculating the potential ROI on every endeavor.

Expand into new markets

Moving into a new market can help you find more customers, serve existing customers better, and secure your business’s future. It makes sense to expand into a new market only when certain conditions are satisfied: you have customer pain points figured out, you can cater to customer needs, you can stay abreast of the competition, and you have a suitable product or service. Inc. offers additional pointers for moving into a new market. For the best results, make sure any expansion drive is accompanied by a marketing campaign.

Find strategic partners

Find strategic partners to secure your growth. This includes internal and external stakeholders as well as complementary businesses.

• Business Partners: Partnering up with other businesses in your niche or acquiring them outright can bring you new customers and enhance your current product or service.

• Service Providers: Service providers offer expertise in areas you’re unfamiliar with. Examples include employing branding agencies to achieve marketing goals or IT service providers to help automate key tasks.
• Investors and employees: Investors can give you the funding you need to achieve your growth goals. Employees contribute valuable skills, ideas, time, and labor.

Change up your product or service

Changing your product or service is integral to growth. It’s how you can better meet ever-changing customer expectations, not to mention keep up with the competition. Offering a high-quality, up-to-date product or service also naturally raises your profile and attracts new customers. Failing to evolve or diversify, on the other hand, will lead to lost customers and stagnancy.

Use process mining to automate and optimize business processes

Scaling – doing existing things better for less money and time – is an important aspect of growth. You can use process mining to refine, automate, and optimize existing business processes. Process mining works by using data to discover, validate, and improve workflows, streamlining, well, everything.

The practice can benefit your entire business – it improves efficiency, increases sales, mitigates risk, and helps you discover hidden opportunities for growth. To get started, identify potential data sources, map out a timeline, and determine key stakeholders.

Reconsider your business structure

Your business structure can confer many advantages – making you more attractive to investors, providing extra flexibility, and making taxes easier. If you change into an LLC, you receive benefits such as limited liability – protection for your non-business assets if you ever get sued. You can file the formation paperwork yourself or use a formation service to avoid hefty lawyer fees.

Secure the capital necessary to survive and thrive

One of the primary reasons that businesses fail is lack of capital. In fact, according to a CB Insight report, 38% of startups that fail cite lack of capital as the reason they went under.

Throughout the lifespan of a business, working capital is necessary to build inventory, pay employees, and expand operations. If you’re not yet generating enough cash to meet expenses and grow your business, you may want to look for sources of funding, such as investors, banks, or lending companies.

Reliant Funding provides quick funding for small businesses. You could receive the funds you need in as quickly as 24 hours. To see if you qualify, complete our 5-minute, no-obligation online application.