Business Growth
This post is a part of The Crisis of Disconnection, a thought leadership series examining the latest research and insights to uncover how businesses can meet their growth goals, even amidst unprecedented changes to the way we work. Despite our hyperconnected world, reaching customers and target audiences has never been harder. And, as we continue to see a shifting economy, evolving platforms, and constantly changing audience preferences, unless we take action the Crisis of Disconnection will only grow in 2023. In this blog series, we’ve brought you up to speed on the Crisis of Disconnection, while outlining how the growth challenges ahead for your business won’t be your average walk in the park. Now, with the daunting stuff behind us, let’s turn our attention toward the light at the end of the tunnel. If you’ve been following along, we’re glad you’re back. If you’re just joining us now, we’re glad you’re
When you’re considering a new venture, one of the first things you should do is determine whether there is a valuable market for it. Imagine putting in months of hard work to realize that there are only 100 people in the U.S. who will potentially buy your product. Knowing this early on will enable you to make educated business decisions and decide what’s worth pursuing. Discover the methods to calculate your market size and accurately measure your business’ revenue potential. There are several reasons why every business should spend time sizing its market: It helps you determine if it’s a worthy investment – Say you have a great idea for a product but there are currently only 100 people who would buy it. From there, you can decide if that population size is worth the cost of manufacturing, production, distribution, and more for your product. It helps you estimate maximum
Do you remember when you were introduced to long-division in grade school? You found yourself needing multiple steps to solve a single problem. It probably seemed like a very daunting and impossible task before your math teacher showed you a hack that broke down your seemingly endless series of steps into only a few. The same can be said about business. Initially, we all have to go through “long-division” level processes, procedures, and series of daily tasks. These might include entering a new marketplace, testing out new messaging and branding, pushing for new profit margins, or onboarding new clients. But we can convert the long-division within our business into short-division, making our efforts much simpler and more manageable. How, you may ask? Through the power of strategy. I’ve had plenty of experience helping companies scale — in fact, I’ve launched over 35 brands and generated over $175 million in revenue
In the business world, professionals are obsessed with tactics because they can help them meet their short-term goals. But if all you do is focus on the short-term, you won’t spend enough time or energy figuring out how you can succeed in the long-term. Fortunately, building a strategy can help you achieve both your short-term and long-term goals. Strategy focuses on principles, which help you think, instead of tactics, which help you execute, so it allows you to concentrate on why your business does certain activities, not just how you do them or what you do. Read on to learn exactly what a business strategy is and how you can build an effective one today. Your business strategy should be based on your overall vision for the company. For some brands it will be global market expansion. For others it may be more important to double down investing in existing
In business, we all love to have insightful reporting dashboards at our fingertips. When done well, they show us where the business is thriving, which areas are struggling, and if we’re on track to reach our goals. That said, creating reporting dashboards can be incredibly time-consuming. It takes time and effort to compile up-to-date, accurate, and meaningful data, not to mention the learning curve required to understand what data to collect and how to do so. This is why reporting is one of the most effective areas of your business to automate. What’s more, it doesn’t have to be complicated to implement automated reporting workflows. Here’s how to automate your business’s reporting workflow for dashboards that are continuously updated, without you needing to lift a finger beyond set-up. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Reporting Workflows So you know that you want to have good data reporting in…
So you’ve decided to grow your business. You might already be thinking about best practices to avoid common pitfalls when scaling. But this doesn’t mean that your business will be immune to challenges. The best strategy for growing businesses is to be aware of common problems so you can prevent them or fix them fast. Here are seven of the most common growth problems faced by small businesses and the best ways to prevent and solve them. 7 Challenges for Growing Businesses 1. Your earliest employees are unhappy. The Problem: While working for a growing business sounds good in theory, some of your earliest employees might start to show signs they’re unhappy. Why do things have to change? Why can’t we all sit around the same meeting table anymore? Why can’t I chat with the CEO whenever I need to? How to Avoid It: If your longest-standing employees are unhappy,…