Growing Your Business: It’s a Balancing Act

Growing your business involves prioritizing and balancing multiple factors:

• Getting your work seen, and making work worth seeing
• Caring for the customers you have, and recruiting new ones
• Managing the factors you can control, and seeking to influence factors outside your control

You can make the best guitars, or provide the best legal advice, or write the best book in the world, but if nobody sees it, it won’t help you grow your business. However, if you invest a lot in advertising and marketing to gain visibility, and your product isn’t good, it won’t help you grow your business.

If you devote yourself too entirely to pleasing a small, existing customer base, you risk being unable to attract new customers. Or if you modify your services for new customers, you may alienate existing ones.

You can control your website, your store, and your advertising, but you can’t control search engines, reviews, or your reputation. You can only try to influence them in the desired direction.

How Small Businesses can Manage Competing Initiatives

Truthfully, there are a lot of ways to be successful across all these seemingly competing goals and needs, and the best method depends on the size of the business, the capabilities of the owner and leadership team, and the needs of the business at the moment. But here are some strategies:

50/30/15/5:

This method carves up your time (either a day, or a week, or a month) or your budget or both and allocates it as follows:

• 50% of your resources are spent on basics: making a good product and delivering good service
• 30% of your resources are spent on marketing and visibility within your control: blogging, refining your website, social media participation, community outreach, etc.
• 15% of your resources are spent on expanding or refining your product and service offerings, through education, research, etc.
• 5% of your resources are spent actively recruiting new customers through advertising, pursuing partnerships, sales, etc.

This method is good for sole proprietors who provide services, who can’t afford to neglect their existing customers, but who also need to ensure that their skills don’t get outdated.

Pendulum method:

The Pendulum Method assumes that, instead of balance, you will shift back and forth. For example, you will spend a period of time focused heavily on internal product perfection and development, then shift your attention to external promotion and advertising. Then take any reviews and feedback from that experience and shift back to perfecting and developing.

This is a really good method for small businesses who make physical products and prototypes, as they shift back and forth from internal manufacturing to external marketing and sales.

Delegating/Outsourcing:

If a business has the budget and resources, it can simply hire people to prioritize certain aspects of the business and let them focus on their specialty. This puts less pressure on a single owner to be responsible for all areas of growth and development, and lets everyone use their time most effectively.

This is critical because no one person is good at everything. The exceptional product designer won’t also be a great writer, or salesperson. The talented manager may not be great at marketing. Growing a business requires a suite of complementary skills that are almost never embodied in a single person.

Delegation is Essential

All successful small businesses will eventually move down the path of delegation, no matter how hands-on or controlling the owner is. A single owner or partnership simply can’t sustainably grow a small business over the long term.

For example, think of a small shop or restaurant run by an owner/manager person or partnership. These can be wonderful businesses to patronize, and customers can truly build a relationship with the business. However, the owner/manager who can’t delegate can never:

• have a prolonged illness, or retire: nobody else knows how to run the business in their absence.
• grow the business: the size and scale of the business is naturally limited by how much work and responsibility one person can manage.
• change and adapt: if their customer demographics begin to shift, or a competitor begins to affect the business, it can be extremely difficult for a single owner/manager to adapt and respond accordingly, because they have developed the working methods and habits that suit them personally

While many people imagine how wonderful it would be to just own their own little bar or cafe and have a quietly successful little business, those people ALSO imagine retiring someday, and that means learning how to delegate.

TBH, I meant this post to be about SEO and how it’s a balancing act and partnership between internal and external factors, but it’s gotten rather long. I’ll address that in a followup post.