Ten Tips To Help You Grow Your Small Business
Growing a business in the online space can be very demanding. And often it feels that the results are coming way too slow.
But there are strategies you can use to help you cope with the day to day challenges of running/growing a business.
Here are ten strategies you can take away today. Let’s dive right in.
- Patience Will Serve You Well
I’ve always been an impatient person. When I want something, I want it yesterday. But in business, patience is a virtue best developed. It takes time to grow a business to achieve the vision you’ve got in your mind. Reaching that vision often takes much longer than we anticipate.
When you’re showing up in the online space, and you’re really passionate about growing a successful business, patience will serve you incredibly well. You have to acknowledge that success doesn’t happen overnight, and be prepared for a journey that will take time.
If you commit to showing up every day, taking small steps forwards, making consistent progress in your business, eventually, the success will come.
However, if you get really frustrated and disappointed about the lack of quick success and the limited results, your journey will be a much more uncomfortable one.
Practice the art of patience. It will serve you well.
2. People Come And Go
It’s simply never going to serve you well to get hung up every time you lose a follower, or someone unsubscribes from your list.
It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, people will always come and go.
People aren’t static. They change. What might work for someone today may not be the thing that works for them tomorrow.
You have to understand that no matter where you are in your business journey, people will always come and go.
Let them go with good grace, without taking it personally, and know that when people disappear, they’re making room for better, newer people to hop on board with you instead.
3. Be Mindful Of Your Mindset
Working on your mindset should be a constant, daily commitment.
If you approach your business with a mindset that is all about lack of, self criticism and negativity, chances are you’re going to attract lack of, judgment and negativity to you.
We reap what we focus on most.
I encourage you to become mindful of the conversations you have with yourself about how you show up as a female business owner, and about how you present your business in the online space.
The more you can develop a mindset that is one of self belief, positivity and abundance in all things, the happier and more positive your journey will be, and the quicker success will come.
It may surprise you when you start to focus on a positive mindset, how much that one action alone can transform your life and your biz.
4. Grow A Tribe
As early on as you can, think about how you can grow a tribe.
This is something I’ve done in my business. I’ve focused really hard on showing up and giving great value to female business owners, and I’ve built a small but remarkable group of women around me, they’ve become my tribe. I support them. They support me. They support each other. We all win.
It’s also important to be part of a tribe that you don’t lead. A tribe of people you can get support from, where you feel you’re part of a community and not alone on your entrepreneurial journey. This is so fundamentally important to your business success, and the tribe you choose to join should be of the same positive mindset, and as passionate as you are about growing a successful business. The sooner you can find that tribe to become part of, the greater and the quicker your successes will be. You can find out more about my tribe here.
5. You Don’t Fail – You Learn
There will be many things that don’t work out the way you expected in your business. It’s easy to look upon those things as failures, and to be floored by them. However, there will never be a time in your business where everything you do is a win, where everything goes to plan. In those times when things don’t work out the way you expected/wanted, rather than see them as failures, see them as lessons to be learnt.
When you do this. Something positive happens.
You learn how to do things better.
You learn how to make your business work more effectively.
When things don’t work out the way you planned, take them as valuable lessons you can learn from that’ll help you become a better, more successful business owner as you move on.
6. Charge Appropriately There are women who will pay £50 for a leather handbag, and there are women who will pay £50,000 for a leather handbag. Both bags have the same function – they carry things.
Each woman may have a different budget available to buy her bag. That’s not the point.
The point is, that there are willing customers for leather bags in any price range.
So many female business owners fear charging appropriately (ie: enough to make good profit), because they believe that they will not sell. As a result they sell too cheaply, ending up in a frustrating loop trying to sell more just to try to cover the costs of their business, with barley enough left to pay themselves.
That’s no way to run a business.
I’d rather sell one business mentoring session for £225 and work to find one client to fit that service, than to have to try to find 10 clients willing to pay £22.50. In fact the work associated with the latter is much harder and more time consuming.
You need to earn enough money from the business you’re running to make it worth your while.
For as long as you price based on fear, and you run your business trying to be kind and make your products and services affordable for everyone, you’ll fail.
With everything you sell, there should be enough profit in that product or service to make it worth your while doing in the first place, to bring enough profit to your business to make it viable, and to be able to pay yourself a decent wage. If this is not happening for you, you need to take action to change this now.
You can charge as much as you want for your products and services, irrespective of what the competition charges, as long as the quality and value you give to your customer matches the price you ask for.
7. Don’t Do Too Much At Once
It’s more effective for your business if you build things out slowly – step by step.
If you’re a solopreneur and you’re trying to show up on all the social platforms, trying to get multiple products/services out into the marketplace, you may find that very quickly becomes overwhelming.
When you spread yourself to wide/thin too quickly, you may not be able to give 100% to all the things you’re trying to do. The quality of your business and level of service you’re offering could suffer as a result.
Don’t dilute yourself too much.
Choose the steps and growth you’ll take in your business carefully. Before you bolt on yet another social platform, product or service, make sure you’re already managing the ones you have available exceptionally well.
Quality trumps quantity every time, in all areas of your business.
I see many female entrepreneurs launch a product or a service, and if it doesn’t take off immediately, they panic and think they’ve got to get more and more out into the marketplace in order to make sales. That’s bad strategy.
It’s more important to hardcore focus on just a few products or services, to show up and showcase those products and services to the best of your ability, at a high level, for an extended period of time, to gain traction.
I see lots of the ladies that follow me over on Instagram show up and talk about their product or service once, and then they never mention it again. You’ll never sell with strategy like that.
I currently have just two core products:
– VIP Group Coaching
– Merchandise
It’s only now, 3 years down the line that I’m ready and adding in:
– Thrive – the budget price membership for female business owners.
– Mastermind – the high ticket all in business strategy coaching group for women who want growth.
Those four products are enough. I need space and time to focus on them exceptionally well, to deliver the best service I can for each. It has taken me three years to get to four product categories.
8. Learn
Never stop learning. I see many female business owners over on social trying to grow a business. It’s clear that they’re investing little in their own learning. They stay stuck. For a long time.
If you want to become the go to expert in your niche. If you want to up-level your business to a higher price range, you need to make a consistent commitment to learning.
Learning how to become better as a female entrepreneur. Learning how to present yourself better. Learning how to make your products better. Learning how to make your services better. Learning how to show up in the online space better. Learning how to connect more effectively with your audience. And on, and on…
Your business will not grow and improve if you don’t make a commitment to learn. When I say make a commitment to learn, I mean put your hand in your pocket, get some money together, and find the deeper learning that you have to pay for, that will get you results.
Books, memberships, training programmes, mentoring, coaching sessions, online and offline events. Find learning resources that are going to help you grow as a business owner. Pay for them. Commit. Do them. Implement what you learn. You’ll scale your business more quickly than ever before when you do this one thing.
9. Have A Great Business Model
I could show you thousands of businesses that have gaps in their business models. Gaps that their audience, followers, subscribers, customers fall through, never to be seen again. Gaps come in all shapes and sizes. They include not showing up consistently enough on social, not having links in your bio on social, not having the right wording in your bio on your social platforms, using your social platforms incorrectly, not having a mailing list in place, not understanding how to send effective emails to your list, not understanding how to get subscribers onto your mailing list. Not having a good website set up that takes your ideal customer on a great journey, not having an opt in on your website, and more..
Many ‘parts’ make a great business model. You need to learn them. And have them in place.
There are more gaps you might have in your business. Think:
- Automations, that do the work behind the scenes so that you don’t have to keep showing up and doing the email work.
- Recurring revenue streams so that you can make money whilst you sleep.
- Bots inside your social platforms to help engage with your audience.
- Clear plans and to dos for all areas of your business to keep you organised and productive.
- Social strategy that takes your audience on a journey with you.
10. Your Tipping Point Will Come
To finish. I want you to be aware of this. And I want you to have faith in this.
If you stick with your business long enough, if you take on board the tips that I’ve shared here, if you go all in with your commitment and hard work, I can guarantee that at some point, your tipping point will come.
Most of the time, your tipping point happens slowly, over a period of time. You’ll start to notice traction, growth, better results. As that process happens it will compound. More and more gains will come on top of each other until you reach a big tipping point where your business really takes off.
All of the gains, the wins, the small successes. They stack one on top of the other over time, taking you slowly but surely to the top of the mountain. And big success arrives.
There-in lies an issue. Most business owners expect too much too soon. When the tipping point doesn’t come quickly enough, they lose faith, give up, walk away.
Don’t let that be you. Know you’re on a journey. Every day you show up, be your best self, keep moving forwards, you’re slowly but surely working your way to that BIG tipping point of success.
It’ll be life changing for you when it comes.
I hope you’ve found this post useful. Hit me up with a comment and let me know if any of the points above resonated with you.
Remember to subscribe. Lots more great posts on the way to help you THRIVE online.