Businesses can grow out of control unless we take stock of them. So many of us have let ideas flounder and fizzle out. Why? Because growing a business is a long, and arduous process. But believe it or not, you’ll be able to effectively propel your brand to new heights by actually doing less.
But how does this work? I’ve broken things down into five simple steps for you. Take a look, and see if you can apply the following advice to your daily running. Want to make the leap from $100k a year to $100k a day? It’s possible – but you’re going to have to simplify.
Focus
When it comes to fine-tuning your focus, you’re going to need to look carefully at the end results of the time and effort you are putting in. You could be wasting time putting effort and energy into tasks and projects which really don’t bring you that much value back.
You need to start mapping where your time is going while running your business. Are you getting enough value back from the time you are putting in? If not, it is time to start looking at opportunities where your focus has a bigger, more valuable return.
Throughput
Let’s think about global metrics. When looking at growth, you should only ever be focusing on how everything pools together. Think carefully about how each stage of your product or service delivery comes together. You’ll need to think about acquisition, customer conversion, and value delivery. Along the way, you’ll hit a bottleneck, which is where you may find results to start trickling out.
The trick to refining your throughput is to ask yourself why you’re getting substandard results. Why aren’t clients responding well to your calls to action? You should look carefully at these points and be willing to change what you’re doing. That’s a lot of value saved, with less time wasted.
Systems
A system is something you should be working to with each and every project. Think of it as a bit of a template. It starts with your client acquisition, continues through conversion, and through to the delivery of value. But how do you make systems work more efficiently for you?
Focus on making your inputs asymmetrical to your outputs. That means to try and put in less than what you get out! Take your feedback, or outcome, and feed it back into the system. Take the money you make, and transfer it back into the process. Refine your systems so that you get feedback quicker, and so that the customer experience only ever improves.
This might take a fair amount of soul searching, but it will help you to deliver great quality, quickly, time and again. The more efficient your systems become, the less effort you will need to put in long-term.
Economics
Finally, let’s think about economics. Taking control of your business’ economics is as simple as identifying your goal, and the metrics that will need to move aside and change for you to get there.
Essentially, we’re talking about looking at all of the points we’ve considered so far. You need to think about the everyday actions which could be holding you back. Are you spending too much each month? Are you able to save anything at all for growth? Ask yourself why you’re not seeing the results you want, again and again. Learn to take control of your systems for the state of your company economics to improve.
Conclusion
So that’s it – ultimately, we’re talking about making sure you take stock of how your business is operating, and what you can do to fine-tune each step of the process. Growing more by doing less is always possible! It’s just a case of tightening up your expenditure and maximizing your resources.
Focus on those tasks which produce greater output for you, and be ready to take control of your systems.