Improving a business begins with assessing your current situation. It means revisiting your business plan to see whether goals and milestones are being met.
But what if, despite your best efforts, things aren’t getting better? What if your profits aren’t growing at the rate you want or need to be growing? In this video, I explore 3 different ways you can do to improve your business when you feel that you’ve done everything already.
Outsource
At some point, like many businesses, you will discover that despite training people or upgrading technology, there are some areas in your business that you cannot efficiently and effectively operate. It’s likely too costly, both money and time-wise, to do it yourself that it is slowly but steadily eroding your bottom line.
The good news is that you do not need to do it alone, you can always outsource it to someone else. For example, you can outsource your IT and database management, your payroll and bookkeeping, even your hiring, and social media management.
Some people view outsourcing as giving up control. Look at outsourcing as hiring an external employee—you don’t give up control, you merely delegate the responsibilities. These external employees, or outsourced employees, may even do a much better job than if it were done in-house.
Form a strategic alliance
For some businesses, there is a desire to grow, but they are hesitant or even unable to invest a huge amount of money required to expand their operations. One of the things you can do is to form a strategic alliance with another business.
A strategic alliance is a partnership between businesses that aims to leverage off of the core competencies of each other. A common example of a strategic alliance is co-branding. Many players in the fashion industry, for example, use this strategy. Examples include H&M and its partnership with high-end designers such as Alexander Wang and Kenzo, or Walt Disney’s partnership with Hewlett-Packard, wherein HP provided the magical experience of the Disney parks’ rides so park visitors can enjoy the Disney experience throughout the park.
Hire an expert
If you can’t figure out how to fix an existing problem, or, worse, you can’t quite figure out what the problem is, you may need to find and hire someone who can provide an objective assessment of your problem and a feasible solution to address this. Do not be afraid to hire someone outside of the business to look into your operations, such as a business coach or consultant.
Look for someone you will be comfortable working with—someone who has the business experience to identify your challenges and the ability to provide pragmatic solutions to overcome them. Interview them the way you would interview anyone who you would bring in to your business—an employee, a team member or a member of the board of directors. After all, they would be working very, very closely with you on the business.
If you are interested to know more about what a business has to go through when facing exponential growth, you can download the first chapter of the book, ”$20K to $20 Million in 2 Years” absolutely free here. The chapter talks about the differences between a good and a great business and puts out questions that make you consider how you can turn your business from good to great.
