10 Proven Ways of Growing your business

Each business is unique in its own way and there can’t be one sure-shot formula that will make the growth of your business possible. But with experience, you can maximize the growth of your business in ways that will work out more often than not.
Today we will bring to you 10 proven ways to grow your business as successful entrepreneurs. 

But first, you need to keep in mind certain points:

• Growth takes time, it’s a natural process that will happen when the time is right, you can’t force bound growth to a time limit. 
• Before discovering the ways through which you can grow your business, you need to first figure out how will you measure the growth. What will be the right parameters to measure progress?  
• There is no way to predict a future and have a definitive formula for success,  however, you can place your business in such a way that it is best positioned to achieve success if you follow these steps.

The beginning is all about launching your business and start building your brand. It is easier said than done as it requires a lot of patience and hard work to establish something of your own.
To begin with, here are the steps you need to follow to grow your business:

1. Research: It is a very important step to get to know your existing customer and also the target customer. It tells you what is it that they want and what would motivate them. It gives you valuable info about your TG and what goes in their mind, what are they excited about and what would encourage them to take the action that you desire.  It is also important to research your competition and know their strength and weakness, it will help you a great deal to find out what is that you need to do to match the competition better.
2. Hire the right people: We can not emphasize enough on this, it doesn’t matter what goal you have if you don’t have a team that can take you to that goal it will always remain a dream. Businesses are very uncertain but the one thing that is definitely certain is your success if you manage to hire the right team. Hiring the best people means that you are better equipped to tackle any challenge that comes your way. Also if you have a high-performing team then you can delegate more work to your team and free more time for yourself to do more tasks and build your business even more.
3. Prioritize existing revenue sources: Before acquiring new customers, focus on your existing customers. Incorporate things like referrals and customer loyalty programs or incentivize repeat purchase behaviour to strengthen your customer base. This is especially true if you are trying to get funding for your business. Banks and other financial institutions are not bothered so much about how many franchises you want to create, instead, they want to know how much interested you are in growing your business. It is very important that you implement a customer loyalty program and develop marketing strategies that are built around repeat purchase behavior.
4. Minimize the risks: Even though risks are bound to exist, there is no way you can totally remove them, but yes you can reduce them and there are different ways to identify the internal and external threats to your company and reduce them. One important resource to help you reach this goal is your business insurance provider.Often disruptions bring risks to business such as the theft of employee data, customer records and product designs can cause great harm to a business making you incur huge losses and putting off the customer’s trust and loyalty in your brand. It is important that you check your insurance policy if it covers such data theft or not and be prepared for any contingency. Also, ensure you have a provision in your insurance coverage that will take care of the remediations and lawsuits. So review your policy periodically and ensure that all the necessary things are covered. Often during your growth phase, you may tend to forget this step, but it is important in the long run.
5. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome: Not just as a businessman, but also as humans your ability to adapt will decide your survival. The sign of a good businessman is the ability to sense the change in the direction of the market and accordingly switch direction and this goes for both your product and company. By adapting quickly you give yourself more time to figure out what is working for your business and what is not for an optimum result. Take for example all the major brand watches who could not foresee their next biggest competition coming from electronic companies such as Samsung and Apple. 
6. Customer experience: One of the fastest ways of gaining popularity is through word of mouth. Deliver your customer a quality product experience and they will sing your praises everywhere but if you mess it up, then remember negativity will reach the world even faster through the same set of customers. If you want quick growth, you got to make your customer feel happy. You should have a mechanism in place that can anticipate and respond to customer needs quickly and thus form long-term relations with customers. When you listen to your customers and give them what they want, they will reciprocate by giving you what you want. You may have to diversify your offering based on the customer requirement, do that. It’s this extra effort that will take your business a long way. 
7. Re-invest in your business: During the initial years of your business profit margins will be low but you must re-invest in business what you have earned because that is what will accelerate your growth. If you will prevent yourself in the beginning from keeping the smaller profits in your pocket, you will end up eventually with bigger profits. Find an area that needs improvement like hiring additional labor, increasing marketing efforts or going for the next round of funding and invest in bridging this gap.
8. Harness the power of social media: People often argue about the uses and abuses of internet but from a business point of view you should create profiles across all major social media platforms and stay active there as that will help form relations that will be used to gain more business. Also, it makes it easy for people to find your business and share it with their friends and family and because it is an interactive platform, customers will feel more connected.
9. Go to networking events: If you want to connect with people from your industry and get their unique insights then you must attend these events the networking you will do at these events will reap you benefits for years to come. Often people from your industry may have had the same problems as you have and at these events, you get a chance to learn from their experiences.
10. Indulge in Corporate Social Responsibilities: People don’t buy what you do, people buy why do what you do. When you indulge in CSR activities it shows to people that you are not just bothered about your profit maximization but you also care about the different ways a business can help the society. Look for different ways through which you can contribute, such as donating to cancer research patients, building shelters for homeless people and other ways through which you can support society as a whole. You could also organize a fundraiser, provide sustainable products, support underserved communities and much more, choose what you relate to most passionately and get straight to it without expecting anything in return.

These were 10 proven ways of growing your business, we wish you all the best for the adventure that lies ahead in your business journey. No matter the scale of your business all these solutions can be implemented for all types of business and depending on what suits your need best you can set a priority list.