Do these 5 things right every time and your business will never stop growing
I’m often asked by clients what the secret of growing their service business is. I nearly always tell them that growth is easy in a business based on services, anyone can grow a small business.
All you need to do is this:
- Deliver what you promise
- At the time you promise it
- For the price you promise it
- For a profit and
- With a smile.
In other words, Deliver what you promise, Every time.
That’s all… Honestly
If you do those 5 things, every day, customers will break down your doors, because so few small businesses do.
Most small businesses fail doing those 5 things consistently and stunt their growth, because of the classic problem of small business growth:
Scale-ability.
It’s easy when you’re small
You see, when your business is small, you and a couple of people delivering all the services, be it plumbing, washing machine repairs, fixing cars, bookkeeping, designing websites or building houses, then it’s easy to manage and be in control of everything. You can make sure things happen the way you want them to happen.
Once you start to grow with 5, 10 or more employees, and you have a number of teams, or vans on the road, suddenly you’re not in touch with everything that goes on anymore. You don’t even get to meet all the customers and you won’t personally see all the services that get delivered. You have to rely on others, and hope they do things the way you want them done. That they communicate with customers they way you expect them to and that they take their dirty boots off before they traipse in through the house.
Managing by keeping your fingers crossed.
And guess what? It doesn’t work. Your customers start being less than happy, they start looking elsewhere, you’ll believe you need to lower your prices to keep them and it all becomes a dog’s game.
So here’s the biggest secret of all to growing your business:
Learn to say no.
Learn to say no, until you can handle the growth. Never taken on any work, any new business, unless you are confident you can deliver it to those 5 standards above.
If you do that, you’ll be in control of your business, you won’t have to compromise on price and you will build a Beautiful Business and Life. And the customers? They’ll keep coming. There is never a shortage of customers for businesses who deliver on all of their promises, with a smile… I promise you.
Your next steps:
If you’re interested to find out more about how I support my clients to do things I’ve written about here and make business fun again. Have a look at my 5 Step Discovery program. The 5 Step Discovery program is designed to answer the question: Is it a good idea for the two of us to work together? The first steps in the Discovery process are entirely free, and the remaining steps are nearly free or low cost. Find out more about the 5 Step Discovery process here.
Quality, Systems and the 7 Big Questions of Small Business
Business owners frequently ask 7 Big Questions about how to Build a Beautiful Business and Life.
The first of these Big Questions is: How do I grow my business?
To answer that question I have identified the 11 most important strategies to create Business Growth.
The eighth of those strategies is Grow your business with Systems. This article and others on this site, explains how Quality, Systems and Growth hang together, in some depth.