GROWTH STRATEGY CONSULTING
Are you ready to scale your business?
Growth Strategy Consulting is a must for your business. Even if you do not have plans to scale or sell your business. Your small business is like a rosebush in your garden — if it’s not growing, it’s dying.
Should your company hire a Growth Strategy Consultant?
That might sound extreme, but it’s true that growth is always an imperative for businesses of all sizes.
Let’s say you’re completely happy with your business base and revenue exactly where it is (which is rare!), you still need to: Acquire new clients or customers, or sell more to existing customers, to replace natural attrition and to account for inflation.
Experts say that industry growth rate increase about the same rate as the economy, which is 2-3% in a good year, with 7-8% considered above average.
So if growth is a necessary part of your strategic planning, how do you make sure you’re doing it “right” — meaning effectively and efficiently — especially when you have so many other things on your to-do list? That’s where a growth strategy consulting service can help fill in the gaps.
What’s growth strategy consulting?
First, a growth strategy consultant helps businesses establish growth objectives, determine the best sources of growth, and finally help in the execution of the strategy.
Depending on your specific company, your business growth might come from any of the following:
More leads. Bringing additional potential customers into your sales funnel to ultimately generate more sales, through advertising or other marketing tactics.
- Increased conversions. Generating more clients, customers, or orders from the same traffic or number of leads. Which consequently leads to my next point…
- More leads. Bringing additional potential customers into your sales funnel to ultimately generate more sales, through advertising or other marketing tactics.
- Larger average order sizes. Selling more to your current customers and clients, sometimes through upsells and cross-sells, and sometimes through additional product offerings.
- Reduced costs. Lowering cost of customer acquisition or product/service delivery costs by creating efficiencies or trimming non-essentials. When you pay less, you make more — and thereby increase net profits.
- New products or revenue streams. Creating new product or service offerings to meet the needs of existing or new customers.
- Mergers and/or acquisitions. Acquiring or licensing products, services, or entire businesses to increase market share.
Why does your small business need growth strategy consulting?
According to Bain & Co., only one in ten companies succeeds in achieving sustained, profitable growth — and the number is likely much lower for small businesses who don’t have access to the resources (and budget) of Fortune 1000 companies.
Consequently, the need for strategy assistance for smaller businesses — those with $1M and less in annual revenues — is just as critical as for larger, multinational firms. Maybe even more so, as small business don’t have internal staff who can step away from day-to-day operations to create high-level strategies.
As you can imagine, these growth calculations can get complicated, fast.
You have to balance current resources with cost and revenue projects, market share, and more. As a result of never creating these types of projections, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. You may miss critical elements that could drastically change your results and lead to losses rather than growth.
The solution is hiring an expert in small business growth. Someone who can dive into your business and market. April Iannazzone asks the right questions to understand and get a better feel of your goals, objectives, and also your resources. Then, together you can strategically chart a course for growth.
What should you look for in a growth strategy consultant?
Once you’ve decided to pursue growth strategy consulting, the next step is to evaluate potential experts. Due to the fact that there isn’t any regulations when it comes to consulting, there isn’t a license. Which means specific trainings aren’t required to take any examinations, or have to receive any kind of certification, hiring a consultant is definitely “buyer beware.”
Therefore we wanted to provide you with some tips to help you find the right consultant for you and your business challenges.
Beware of consultants who do the following:
- Guarantee specific results. Consultants should be able to tell you exactly what they’ll be doing to earn their fee, but they should never guarantee results. While offering up an average range, or typical results, is common, if a consultant tells you they’ll help you hit 20% growth, “no problem,” run the other way.
- Can’t produce examples or testimonials. You don’t want to be a guinea pig, even if you’ve got a strict budget. Make sure to ask for — and review — testimonials and examples of their work. When you review them, at least one should be in a similar industry or market to yours.
- Don’t want to be bothered. If your candidate seems put out by your requests for more information or feedback, look elsewhere. Anyone you bring on needs to be dedicated to your business and willing to be a “team player.”
- Work in a “black box.” Your consultant should be willing to share his or her approach and methodology with you. Because of this, some of their information and process will be intellectual property. As a result he or she should still give you an overview of the process they’re going through to generate the recommendations for your business.
>> TAKE THE QUIZ: Is Your Business As Profitable As It Could Be?
- Want to keep you dependent on them. The best consultants will increase your knowledge base and skill level so you can carry on future work independently. While you may want to enlist their support in execution, and you may want to come back for further assistance, you should be able to take their recommendations and plans and carry them out. If you can’t “fly solo,” something’s wrong.
- Won't put anything in writing. As a small business CEO or entrepreneur, you might be used to working “on a handshake.” While that may have worked for you so far, as you grow you must start guarding your investments, and that starts with documenting, documenting, documenting.Further more, your consultant should draw up a project proposal so both of your interests are protected.
In Summary...
Whether you’re happy with a small business, or you have visions of a multiple-seven-figure future, a growth strategy consulting from the Growth & Profitability Agency can help you create a plan to a future that meets your needs and keeps your business thriving.
