A business is a transformational diaphragm from expectations penned in the business model to the practical establishment with the biggest rate of survival fundamentals. In this journey, the boulders encountered while walking forward with iterations, to break free, and to leaf out of the competition most healthily is what entrepreneurial growth is.
Is starting up tough and 100% worth it?
As per research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approx. 20% of the businesses fail to survive within the first couple of years since their commencement. 45% of them write off their books within 5 years and 65% within their first decade. Even if the question arises that based on their industry, they failed to solve a specific pain point, the figures mentioned above are highly consistent across all the domains. This indicates how tough the entrepreneurial growth can be and why planning since day one with all the permutations and combinations of contingency is the way to stay viable.
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Why do we need business strategies and plans?
Business growth at a positive scale is not just limited to marketing and sales, but the coordination and amalgamation of all the several departments that act as a pillar of standalone and support for the rest of the foundation. This is the most crucial cog that allows the company to go through all the fluctuations and still grow.
The only reason for a company to have an entrepreneurial growth plan is to satiate their hunger of delivering an offering of consideration to their target audience to make their life more useful and easier.
The entrepreneurial journey may be a tough lane, so let’s deep-dive into some of the proven hacks and growth strategies that can allow you to take away new implementations as an entrepreneur.
1. Channelize your planning for expansion
As an entrepreneur, consistently look for diversified channels to sell your products and make them visible throughout. If your head office is in a particular location, never restrict yourself from solving the problems of your target audience within the boundary of that peripheral only. You need to identify several physical and online channels best suited for your products & services to be listed and expand therein by selling too. Also understand, that you have the solution for a certain pain, your customers are needy and if the product has eyed an impression on them, they will be able to find you more easily and pursue you with their investment.
There can be two channels that you can plan for to sketch expansion in your business model. Those are:
1. Chain of sub-offices
If you have one head office in a particular city, don’t handcuff yourself to open branch offices in another city or the same city itself. Doesn’t matter if you sit on them, visit them or lease them to professionals who will be working under you on the same mission and vision drafted by you, or even sideline it with a franchise model.
With the chain of sub-offices, the number of impressions that you will leave in the national market can yield you, several customers, through indirect advertisements and expansion strategies. Not only this, the expansion can make your company more durable than your competitors combined.
2. Digital listing in the national and international market
All the companies who have adopted the expectations of peak entrepreneurial growth in the digital transformational model for entrepreneurship should never limit their listings of products and services to their website only. They need to realize that if their entire business model and revenue generation graph is supported by online sales only, then they will have to partner with as many commercial channels as they can to generate their product impressions in the eyes of the needy. They can partner with established online commercial stores and can also rely on them for warehouse storage and shipping in consideration of a commission rate on sales.
To walk and reach as many people as you can turn the dice of business expansion. You might make a fortune easily by marching rather than staying at a place and engaging the target audience with a slow entrepreneurial growth rate.
2. Expand and diversify offering tiers
If you have ever built a product or delivered any kind of service through your company, you will know that it might not be necessary to have a single tier of target audience ever. Every customer has a graph of pain points they want to resolve by using your solutions and offerings.
If you check out your competitor’s offerings, you would be surprised to learn that they had channelized the products and services to a certain level of plans and tiers, sometimes even customization on demand. Do not hesitate to cut the blocks of your offerings into good, better, and best categories and let your customers choose the service level they intend to attain from you rather than keeping a fixed price for the entire product altogether.
Also, after categorizing the offerings, it might not be a fairytale for customers to start buying your plans just because you have flexible options for them. The entrepreneurial growth hacks stand when you exceed what your competitors are offering and at what flexibility. To attain baseline trust, you can offer a trial period for your products and services so that they can understand the usage ability and allow you to scale up if the foundation lays.
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3. Multiply your offerings
If you, as an entrepreneur have fewer service offerings and more of a product selling revenue generation model, this one’s for you. Understand the model of service offerings, categorizations of services, tiers of pain points, and customization. By doing so, you can draft the expansion strategy for your product offering as well.
Not only that, you will be able to categorize the features of your products into tiers and attain more inquiries. Research and identify various domains where your product can be introduced and start making addons based on customization for new market entry points. Find a gap that your competitor has not yet thought off and pull customers by offering them an umbrella of hopes and implementations.
Attempt to interact with your customers as much as you can and seek their opinion on what else do they think could be a perfect combination of add-ons to your current product, what do they exactly love, and what they resent, and what else can you implement to multiply those offerings to a positive experience.
4. Communicate with existing as well as potential leads for loopholes
Feedback is a continuous process and so is a milestone of attaining new revenue streams in an entrepreneurial journey. Without proper feedback, you might be shooting your listings of offerings into commercial websites and just expect someone to stumble upon it and buy. You will be breaking by the end of the day financially and the question for expansion will diminish too eventually.
Now, whom to communicate with and what channels can you use? To attain feedback and understand where you are now and what you can do to reach where your customers want you to? Are the self-analysis ground questions you need to research upon?
Attempt to strengthen your marketing department and draft an e-mail to your existing customers with a feedback form and review/suggestion inputs space. Before you plan to expand your product and service offerings, categorization of existing tiers, or adding trial and error modulation of a new product, just fetch the customer experiences and expectations on your layered plan because it is rightly said, “Customers are always right.”
As soon as you receive the suggestions and reviews of your demos/e-mails, it will give you a crystal-clear insight into what to focus on. With parameters of inputs ranging from what have you done, what are the expectations of customers further, what are the services they are outsourcing despite your offerings and how is your competitor up to the mark? – you will be able to further focus on all the additional pain points which you didn’t realize.
5. Balance existing customers with new leads and retention
Statistics reveal that there are more than 27 million Americans who are commencing or are planning to commence their own venture this year. An estimate of $72.3 billion investments by VCs has also been pooled for those establishments. Such a huge investment with a dedicated return on investment is only possible when all the ventures either have an existing customer base who don’t want to switch or the entrepreneurs have tapped into an open market with a pre-determined customer base.
An entrepreneur can only focus on growing his company when the business model has a customer retention section charted. These are those customers who are investing their money in your offerings which thereby are being used for the exploration and engagement of new customers through diversified marketing channels.
You will have to make sure that those customers don’t switch to any other competitors and are transformed to your retention model. You can streamline the channel of open communication and accept their reviews and feedback, share them a greeting message for their trust with your company all through a simple email. These gestures will allow them to feel attended due to their participation and they might stick to your company for a longer period.
The process of focusing on long-term relationships and balancing retention with the existing customer can offer you lucrative investments that you can use even when the flow of revenue from the sales channel is minimal.
6. The “When They Zig, We Zag” Approach
One of the best entrepreneurial growth strategies for any business venture is “Standing Out.” This means creating and deploying an out-of-the-box user experience that any competitor is failing to provide as a solution for the specific target audience. It is as simple as stating that if you find yourself in the loop of monotony, without breaking it, you can’t attract, engage nor transfer potential customers.
Let’s take an example to understand it better. Suppose you are a company that offers a Mobile Device Management solution by locking down an organization’s owned managed devices into Kiosk mode. In the same way, your competitors started cloning every feature that you are offering to your present customer base. The competitors have added a few add-ons such as conditional branding based on their customer approach and understanding to generate more revenue by branding impressions. This approach of the competitors has frustrated the customer base to the core.
Seeking the opportunity, you decided to pick the pain point in the current market scenario and shed some baggage off the competitor’s customer base by rectifying an additional feature in your product. You added customized branding of any company that uses or purchases your product instead of promoting your own brand just the way your competitor did. This point of differentiation will attract more customers to your brand and you can exponentially grow. This is why it is said, “if they Zig, we Zag.”
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Closing lines…
The bottom line of understanding the biggest hacks and strategies of business expansion is seeking feedback and implementing the best one from your customers. It might not be possible to attain every pain point with market research and development in your office but with a continuous loop of suggestions, you can potentially be out-of-the-box from your competitors.
Open your customer support channels for your customers at every moment possible, with communication with partners, they will feel more important and valued who will never even turn their heads towards your competitors ever.
This article is written by Ayush Maskara, the Content Marketer at Scalefusion. One of the best customer support services examples in the MDM and Kiosk lockdown solutions across platforms such as Android MDM, iOS, macOS, and Windows is Scalefusion. Their dependable customer service support reflects their passion for the expansion and growth of the company not by selling just their product offerings but also walking along with their partners who are supporting and investing in the organization’s belief. Grab their free trial period and explore the capabilities of MDM solutions and Unified Device Management offerings and how it’s easier than ever to attain any customer support, no matter how direct or complicated your journey might get.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
