How to Start A Business Course – Growing Your Business: The Principles Of Growth – Part 27/27

The journey of entrepreneurship is both exciting and challenging – posing a thrilling uphill climb for entrepreneurs who desire to start, launch, grow, and scale the business of their dreams. To reach the next desired level of success and propel your business into its optimal state, your business must develop and adapt continuously. However, one of the biggest challenges faced by small businesses within their start-up phase, especially, is to establish a solid foundation and both recognize and leverage opportunities for sustainable business growth.

"Every problem is a gift because, without problems, we wouldn't grow." - Anthony Robbins

This quote is as applicable in your personal life, as it is in your business. Throughout your entrepreneurial journey and your business life cycle, you’ll be faced with a variety of challenges. How you perceive, approach, and overcome these challenges will depend on your mindset, passion, mission, and vision. You should see these challenges as opportunities to better yourself and your business – because no person or business is perfect. There’s always room for improvement.

This topic will aim to enhance your knowledge about the basic principles of sustainable business growth, methods for strengthening your launch foundation, and the various approaches followed by successful entrepreneurs to ensure sustainable business growth.

Objectives:

• The 7 Stages of a Business Lifecycle
• The Principles of Sustainable Business Growth
• The 1000-Day Entrepreneurship Principle

The 7 Stages of a Business Lifecycle

A small business goes through various development-based stages throughout its lifecycle – each characterized by different cycles and development criteria. Throughout each stage/cycle, the business focuses on different areas, prioritizes certain business units, faces different challenges, and requires different strategic approaches. The small business lifecycle usually goes through the majority of the following stages:

Stage 1: Seed

During the seed stage of your business lifecycle, your business finds itself in its ideation phase. This stage is characterized by crafting your product/service concept, conducting market research and analysis, as well as exploring your competitive landscape, and identifying your target audience – at a minimum.

The seed stage should set the foundation for your business launch, as well as sustainable business growth – such as your vision, mission, SMART goals, objectives, milestones, and actions plans are framework, at a minimum.

• Generate ideas/concepts for business
• Conduct market research & analysis
• Explore the direct competitive landscape
• Identify target audience / segments
• Determine overall vision & mission
• Define SMART goals & objectives
• Design milestones & action plans

Challenges

Most seed-stage businesses must overcome the challenge of market acceptance and ensure their product/service finds the correct market fit. Some aspiring entrepreneurs don’t move past the seed stage of their business, due to a few intrinsic challenges faced. These would include a fear of failure, a lack of resources, as well as disheartenment – primarily due to the uncovered competitive nature of their industry/sector/field.

Focus Areas

Should your business be within its seed stage, the focus should remain on matching your passion, experience, and skill set with the business opportunity. Other focus areas include completing and testing your start-up business plan, determining your business structure, seeking guidance from professionals/mentors, as well as product/service ideation, blueprinting, prototyping, and testing. The funding focus during the seed stage, with no proven market or customers / end-users, should

be on personal capital, business loans, crowdfunding, angel investors, as well as funding acquired through your personal/immediate network, government grants, and other seed-stage / start-up funding sources.

Stage 2: Startup

Between your seed stage and start-up stage, your business finds itself within its pre-launch phase. During this stage, every single aspect and element of your business is designed, tested, and optimized -ready for the day of launch. During this stage, you ensure that your strategy is bulletproof and that your business plan aligns with your overall business vision. You’ll also ensure that your Integrated Marketing Strategy (IMS) is optimized, and ready to create optimal awareness for your new business – and, that your business is legally registered and your products/services are in production – ready to receive their first customers / end-users.

• Design, test & optimize elements
• Ensure bulletproof business strategy
• Align business plan with the overall vision
• Optimize multi-channel marketing
• Generate optimal customer awareness
• Register business name & property
• Produce first products/services

Challenges

During the start-up stage, you’ll primarily focus on overestimating your capital requirements and the appropriate time to go-to-market. The main challenge, however, is to ensure that you don’t burn through the funding acquired before your business reaches its break-even point – in other words, the point where your costs and revenue are equal.

Focus Areas

Start-up business should focus on establishing a solid customer / end-user base and a strong market presence, as well as ensure that your cash projections are feasible and that you have enough cash flow to serve as the foundation for your launch and pre-growth phase – before your business starts making a profit. The funding focus during the start-up stage typically includes your seed-stage funding sources, as well as supplier payments and initial customer purchases.

Stage 3: Growth

During the growth stage of your business, which is what we’ll focus on throughout M3, your customer base and revenues are increasing, and you’re generally able to expand your team. Your revenue streams are constant, and your profits are growing – moving your business closer to its break-even point, and perhaps beyond. During this stage, your business will encounter various opportunities and challenges – providing an entrepreneur with opportunities to change/enhance their business strategy and transform their start-up business plan into a viable growth/expansion framework. During this phase, your marketing efforts will be enhanced – ensuring your business maintains momentum and breaks through the initial growth-stage barriers.

• Increase customer base & revenue
• Expand internal & external team
• Ensure consistent revenue streams
• Create a viable expansion framework
• Enhance integrated marketing efforts
• Maintain strong market momentum
• Break through growth-stage barriers

Challenges

During this stage, entrepreneurs typically deal with an influx of rivalry – activating an unspoken bidding war between competitors for their customers / end-users attention and buying power. Effective leadership and management are required to manage teams and optimize performance, with possible recruitment and delegation to ensure an internal balance and optimal workflow. During this stage, entrepreneurs are also required to optimize their customer-related platforms and communication, to ensure the optimal customer experience – which usually requires additional capital.

Focus Areas

During the growth stage, entrepreneurs should primarily focus on optimizing every aspect and element (processes, systems, and controls) within their business, based on customer feedback and key learnings throughout the start-up phase. They should also focus on acquiring new customers / end-users and implementing a Customer Retention Plan (CRP) ensuring existing customers are taken care of – placing additional focus on the customer journey and experience, to enhance customer satisfaction and lifetime value. The funding focus would be on acquiring additional revenue from a growing customer base and planning to acquire/allocate expansion capital from banks, grants, partnerships, and investments.

Stage 4: Established

The established stage is where the entrepreneur would implement their sustainable growth strategy – ensuring that their business runs optimally and continues to grow, without additional funding and resource injections. Your business is moving towards its maturity stage and should be thriving – running like a well-oiled machine, maintaining a strong presence within the desired market, and having a strong customer-base, with hints of loyalty and advocacy among your customers / end-users. Your sales growth is stable and manageable, but not explosive – moving your business beyond its break-even point and maintaining a stable revenue stream/streams.

• Implement a sustainable growth strategy
• Ensure optimal business flow & grow
• Reduce the need for extra cash & resources
• Maintain a strong market presence
• Stabilize & manage sales-growth
• Move beyond the break-even point
• Maintain steady revenue streams

Challenges

The challenge most entrepreneurs face during the established stage is relentless competition and an enhanced bidding war for the attention and buying power of customers / end-users. Perhaps you’ll experience a surge of new rival entrants into the market, offering versions of your product/service with various/similar features and at competitive price points. Customer demands/preferences are also ever-changing during this stage, especially due to the increase in competitive offers, which provides an entrepreneur with both an opportunity and challenge to expand their product/service assortment.

Focus Areas

During the established stage, the entrepreneur will primarily focus on optimization throughout the entire business and implementing sound business practices, as well as investing in various technologies to innovate and automate various processes, systems, and controls. The latter is primarily embedded to ensure optimal internal workflows/communication flows, as well as customer experience. The focus here would be to optimize the Integrated Marketing Strategy (IMS) as well, to ensure touch-points throughout the customer journey are both optimized and personalized – creating a more engaging and competitive customer experience. The funding focus throughout this stage would be on the acquisition of expansion capital from primarily business profits, banks, investors, and government – should an entrepreneur wish to expand their business beyond its current capabilities and/or location.

Stage 5: Expand

The expansion stage is primarily characterized by the acquisition of expansion capital and leveraging opportunities for business-wide expansion. This would generally include expanding the business geographically, adding additional products/ services to its offering assortment, expanding its production/ manufacturing capabilities, and embedding overall enhancement tactics throughout the business.

The entrepreneur is primarily focused on entering new markets and activating new distribution channels – reaching various additional target markets or customer segments, further increasing market share, revenue streams, and profit channels.

• Acquire sufficient expansion capital
• Consider geographical expansion
• Explore adding additional offerings
• Increase production capabilities
• Determine new & feasible markets
• Create additional distribution channels
• Target other customer segments

Challenges

The challenge most entrepreneurs face during this stage is deciding whether expansion is feasible and whether their business would flourish by remaining within the established stage. This stage is thus met with additional rigorous research and planning – focusing on business opportunities that complement, and not hinder, your current experience and capabilities. The challenge entrepreneurs also face is finding the balance between rapid expansion and sustainable growth. Rapid expansion, usually fueled by an enhanced competitive landscape, could lead to expansion into unrelated markets – a dangerous area to move into.

Focus Areas

During the expansion stage, business is primarily focused on adding complementary products/services to their existing offering assortment to diversify their customer base and increase their market share. The focus here is on determining the feasibility of various expansion opportunities, including whether adding additional locations / micro-branches to the business would be beneficial in the long run. The funding focus is primarily on joint ventures, franchising, licensing, partnerships, and additional investors.

Stage 6: Decline

During the decline stage, some businesses are directly impacted by dramatic changes within the six PESTEL areas, which include the political, economic, societal, technological, environmental, and legal environments. Changes within these environments usually impact industries/sectors collectively, decreasing customer / end-user buying power and ultimately sales/profits. Micro, small, and medium businesses are usually the ones that are impacted most by these changes and could quickly result in liquidation/closure of the business.

• Combat severe changes in the industry
• Deal with changes in PESTEL areas
• Face decrease in C/S buying power
• Absorb severe loss of sales & profit
• Determine the strength of MSME structure
• Identify the impact of changes on business
• Decide whether to liquidate or close

Challenges

Although not all businesses experience the decline stage, the primary challenge some businesses face during the decline stage is a dramatic decrease in sales and profits – usually resulting in a negative cash flow and fueled by a lack of contingency cash to support the negative cash flow. Businesses primarily affected by these external influences also lack an agile sustainable growth strategy and interest in investing in innovation or leveraging change. However, the most difficult challenge entrepreneurs and their teams face is deciding whether the business is salvageable or whether a complete exit should be considered.

Focus Areas

Businesses facing the decline stage should primarily focus on re-evaluating their overall business strategy and identify opportunities for cost/debt reduction, process optimization, resource streamlining, and so forth. During this stage, entrepreneurs would search for new opportunities for the existing business or seek entirely new business ventures. Should the entrepreneur recognize an opportunity to salvage the existing business, additional angel investors, business owners, and recovery capital should be sourced. During this stage, the additional funding/support acquired will either be used to recover the business in its entirety or serve as acquisition/equity capital – essentially selling your business and removing your ownership from the business.

Stage 7: Exit

During the exit stage, entrepreneurs/business owners who didn’t acquire recovery capital could make one of two decisions: (1) They could decide to cash out and sell their business to a new owner, or (2) they could make the difficult decision to shut the business down.

• Cash out & Sell
• Close Business

Challenges

The challenge faced during this stage is implementing a realistic valuation of your business and what it’s worth, after selling unnecessary assets and paying back debt. To reach this stage, the business has been in existence for years, but the valuation should reflect the true value in the current marketplace. The primary challenge entrepreneurs/business owners face when deciding to leave/close their business, is dealing with any financial losses and the psychological impacts of business loss.

Focus Areas

The primary focus during the exit stage is conducting a proper valuation of your business, which would include evaluating your business operations, management, and competitive barriers – to increase the worth of your business. During this stage, you’ll set up legal buy-sell agreements, along with a business transition plan/framework. The funding focus during this stage would be to source a business valuation partner and consult with your accountant and financial advisors – to ensure the best strategy for selling or closing your business.

The period/length of each business lifecycle depends on the nature of a business and whether an entrepreneur prioritizes rapid growth or sustainable growth. Some entrepreneurs desire to build and flip, quickly transitioning their business from start-up to exit – prioritizing rapid growth and cashing out.

Other entrepreneurs will avoid expansion and settle within the established stage – prioritizing sustainable business growth. The successful transition between life cycles depends on an entrepreneur’s ability to leverage and adapt to the changes, challenges, and focus areas throughout each stage.

Understanding where your business fits within the business lifecycle, and ensuring you understand the changes, challenges, and focus areas within each stage, will prepare you for best business practices.

The Principles of Business Growth

board, empty, rule-3772063.jpg

Irrespective of the nature of your business, the strategic approaches implemented within your business, and the external elements impacting your business, there are several time-tested principles that could assist in ensuring your business is positioned for sustainable business growth. These include (1) Valuing Feedback, (2) Remaining Customer-Focused, (3) Forecasting for the Future, (4) Investment in Innovation, (5) Optimization and Quality Assurance, as well as (6) Financial Stability and Strength, and (7) Social Responsibility.

These are examples of focus areas throughout the entire business lifecycle but play a particularly crucial role within the first 100 days post-launching your business. Should these be prioritized, you’ll set a strong foundation for sustainable business growth and gaining a sustainable competitive advantage.

Value Internal Feedback

Throughout your first 100 days post-launching your business, you have to consider internal and external feedback – to Optimize every element of your business. Collecting internal feedback includes gathering important insights from your employees and other valuable stakeholders within your business – particularly regarding the effectiveness of workflow/ communication processes, additional ideas/concepts contributing to strategic decision-making, as well as their general experience. The value you place on these insights will depend on your leadership/ management style. Irrespective, these insights play a vital role in optimizing the inner workings of your business, which ultimately affect the effectiveness of your external activities.

Value External Feedback

Collecting external feedback includes collecting insights from primarily your customers/clients / end-users regarding their overall experience with your business and customer-related activities, referring to the identified touch-points throughout your Customer Journey Map (CJM). This collection process could include gathering insights regarding their experience with your product/service, their experience with your customer-related processes, your traditional and digital marketing/promotion-related materials, changes in their demands or preferences, as well as their overall engagement and satisfaction with your business.

Remain Customer-Focused

Depending on the nature of your business, you might deal with customers, clients, or other types of end-users. Irrespective, their needs/demands/preferences should be prioritized, and extra effort should be made to holistically understand their expectations. When conducting your market research and analysis, you’ll gain insights into the prospective personas of your customers, as well as their needs/ demands/ preferences and overall experience expectations. However, once you’ve launched your business, you need to remain abreast regarding any possible changes within these expectations and review additional cues that should be added to their customer personas.

Understanding your customers from a 360-degree perspective will ensure they feel appreciated and will enhance their overall experience with your business – providing you with armor to accelerate your customers from the awareness stage to the advocacy stage within your customer journey, break through the competitiveness barriers, as well as set a solid foundation for a sustainable competitive advantage.

By prioritizing relationships and engagements with your customers/clients / end-users, you’re able to both grow your customer base through effective acquisition and retain existing customers through personalized experiences, simultaneously. Implementing an agile Customer Acquisition and Retention Strategy (CARS) and adjusting this strategy according to key learnings within your first 100 days post-launching your business, the sooner you’ll acquire loyal customers with an increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). After all, the customer experience is a competitive battleground and sets the foundation for sustainable business growth.

Forecast for the Future

Successful entrepreneurs value the importance and impact of market research and analysis throughout the business lifecycle. The internal and external environments of your business will change continuously and remaining aware of and leveraging these changes will provide a strong foundation for sustainable business growth and a sustainable competitive advantage.

The key to sustainable business growth and sustainable competitive advantage is not only your customer-related strategies but your ability to develop an agile strategy that easily adopts and adapts to internal and external changes/trends.

Although it’s impossible to predict the future, an entrepreneur must remain aware of any possible changes/trends within their business and industry, that could impact their growth. This would include closely and continuously monitoring your employee and customer expectations, changes within your competitive landscape, trends within your industry, and the PESTEL environments – subsequently forecasting the impacts these elements will have on your business and implementing a change-ready / agile strategy to combat and leverage these changes. Continuous market research and analysis should thus be prioritized – irrespective of the stage of your business lifecycle.

Remain Forward-Thinking

Entrepreneurs who value and prioritize innovation, and investment in innovative activities/solutions, will remain at the forefront of their competitive landscape. Investment in innovation should be considered both a systematic and holistic approach – continuously seeking ways to optimize within your internal and external environments.

Adopting the latter approach could mean investing in optimizing your internal processes, systems and controls, your products/services and your general solution, your promotional / marketing-related platforms and content, your design/production/ manufacturing processes, and your customer-related processes – ultimately, every element within and throughout your business, your supply and value chain, as well as your Customer Journey Map (CJM).

This goes hand-in-hand with forecasting for the future, as your market research and analysis will continuously seek ways in which to optimize every element of your business. This requires thinking of new ways in which to conduct various business activities and possibly investing in various technologies and software to support the optimization process.

Prioritizing innovation and continuously optimizing throughout your business, will provide your business with a sustainable competitive edge and ultimately enhance your customers/clients /end-users experience with your business.

Embed Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance (QA) is considered the active maintenance of the desired level of quality throughout each element/activity within your business. This relates to delivering quality products/services and customer-related services, optimizing the platforms, processes, systems, and controls throughout your business, enhancing your promotion / marketing-related platforms and content, and various other elements/activities throughout your business.

Embedding sound business practices, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and Quality Assurance policies/protocols throughout your business will ultimately solidify your position with your desired market and create a perception of quality among your most valued stakeholders – including your suppliers, customers/clients / end-users, business partners and investors.

The perception of quality among your customers/clients / end-users, specifically, is directly related to your brand identity and could create a loyal customer base. Quality Assurance is also directly related to innovative thinking – implementing new technologies and software to enhance your product/service, your customer-related services, your internal workflow/communications, your design, production/manufacturing capabilities, and other crucial business units/activities.

Embedding sound business practices, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and Quality Assurance policies/protocols throughout your business will ultimately reduce overall costs, avoid redundant activities, and ensure your business runs smoothly.

Ensure Financial Stability

Embedding a sound financial strategy within your start-up business plan will ensure that, among other elements, (1) your cash-flow projections are feasible and adequate, (2) your business launches with sufficient capital and enable access to contingency cash, (3) you’re able to budget properly and adequately allocate money towards the correct activities, (4) you’re able to embed the correct sales/pricing strategies and sales forecasts, (5) you’re able to attract external investment/capital and (6) set the foundation for sustainable business growth.

Understanding your business-related financials, remaining abreast of the internal and external flow of your money, and maintaining good money management forms a crucial part of your sustainable business growth strategy and overall business success.

Your financial strategy should provide you with the necessary confidence to launch your business and absorb the financial impact of any unforeseen circumstances post-launching your business. Feasible and adequate predictions/projections around any outgoing and incoming cash should be clarified and defined – to ensure your business doesn’t run out of cash once launched. It could also provide the necessary foundation for sourcing external funding from investors to support the growth/expansion of your business. Sound money management is thus the cornerstone of overall business success.

Gaining the support of a reputable accountant, bookkeeper, and financial planner/advisor is thus highly recommended.

Remain Socially Responsible

Most modern customers support businesses that promote and actively engage in socially responsible business practices – embedding eco-conscious efforts within their strategies and contributing to societal/ environmental well-being. These types of customers focus on the authenticity of the business and consider the business’ core values as part of their engagement/ purchase consideration set.

Irrespective of the nature of your business and the composition of your offering, you should prioritize eco-conscious activities throughout your business and embed contributing to the welfare of society in general within your core values. These could include transparent, sustainable, and ethical business practices, recycling / upcycling and general waste management, overall carbon footprint reduction, supporting social causes through upliftment and donations, and so forth.

Given these expectations among modern customers/clients / end-users, entrepreneurs should embed a Social Responsibility Strategy into their start-up business plan and identify opportunities for shared value from the onset and throughout their entire business lifecycle. It will form a vital part of your Customer Retention Strategy (CRS) and support the journey to creating a loyal customer base. It’s crucial that these socially / environmentally responsible activities not only be embedded throughout your business but that they are actively communicated throughout your Integrated Marketing Strategy (IMS) – to create awareness among modern customers and propel your business onto their evoked set.

These principles are but a few examples of principles that should be considered, valued, prioritized, and actively embedded throughout your business lifecycle – especially during your first 100 days post-launching your business. These will not only provide you with the foundation for sustainable business growth but enable you to gain a strong competitive advantage from the onset.

1000-Day Principle of Entrepreneurship

pins, calendar, meeting-1799320.jpg

An entrepreneur’s startup business journey, from the 1st to the 3rd year, consists of an exciting and challenging mixture of dreams and delivery. Ideally, the (1) 1st year consists of dreaming and defining a business vision, (2) the 2nd year includes planning and launching a business, and (3) the 3rd year is designed to facilitate the growth and expansion of a business.

First Year in 1000 Days

The 1st year includes visioning, excitement, and enthusiasm for a newly found business opportunity. The entrepreneur conducts market research, completes their business plan, designs, and tests their product/services, pitches their ideas to investors, and launches their new business. It ultimately includes various shades of exploration and discovery.

Entrepreneur generally leverages their own experience and expertise to comprehensively outline their business and determine the inner workings of each activity/unit – sometimes accompanied by the input of a newly sourced business partner. During this period, the entrepreneur typically leans on their immediate and secondary networks for resources and support – possibly recruiting one or two employees for additional administrative support.

The focus during the 1st year is primarily on designing the optimal business plan that will empower the entrepreneur to expand their business, either vertically or horizontally. This business plan should set the foundation for sustainable business growth and provide entrepreneurs with the necessary ammunition to be at the forefront of their competitive landscape.

During the 1st year, the entrepreneur would typically launch the business and focus on building trusting relationships with their employees, customers/clients, and suppliers. The 1st 100 – 150 days post-launch is considered a crucial period for gathering valuable insights as to overall performance and areas for improvement from these and other crucial stakeholders, including your direct and indirect competitors.

These improvement areas could refer to internal and external platforms, processes, systems, and controls – including internal workflow/communication and customer-related activities. This requires the entrepreneur to understand both their employees and customers/clients, providing access to the appropriate employee and customer feedback platforms – ultimately enhancing the overall performance of the business from the inside-out and outside-in.

In light of this relationship-building period, the entrepreneur would prioritize crafting the optimal Integrated Marketing Strategy (IMS) and Customer Journey Map (CJM) which focuses on personalized experiences for its customers, providing 24/7 customer support, as well as providing access to quality and engaging promotional content.

During the 1st year, the entrepreneur should also prioritize good money management and ensure that sufficient capital is available to support the business’ transition into its 2nd year. Effectively managing the startup finances of the business would typically include keeping costs as low as possible, without compromising on quality, and only embarking on activities that benefit the customer/client. Typically, zero profits are identified within the 1st year and break-even slowly approaches.

The entrepreneur would ensure the optimal pricing strategy, based on sound market research, as well as ensure adequate budgeting and allocation of resources to streamline cash flow.

Second Year in 1000 Days

Once the business reaches its 2nd year, the entrepreneur should have a clear understanding of intricacies and movement within/among their industry, market, customers, business, and employees. Typically, the business has achieved its product-market fit during this period. Entrepreneur also fully understands their competitive landscape and relies on valuable insights to identify areas for improvement throughout the business to strengthen their competitive position within their market.

These areas could include methods for optimizing their product and/or services, as well as identifying opportunities for investment in technology and innovation throughout the business. Given the solid customer base built and the feedback generated from these customers, these improvements would include enhancing customer support-related platforms, processes, systems, and controls – enabling a more personalized experience for your customers/clients throughout their customer journey. This period is thus generally used to build on the challenges and failures experienced during the 1st year and transform them into opportunities for growth.

During the 2nd year, the business should have a steady revenue stream that falls short of profit, given that the break-even point is typically not reached within the 1st two years. This revenue stream is typically invested back into the business to expand on small elements, which include hiring additional employees, building the customer base through enhanced marketing efforts, improving the product/service, and further revamping / streamlining various platforms, processes, systems, and controls within the business where possible.

Sometimes, businesses would seek additional investment to support the enhancement of their business and/or offering – depending on their market demand and capacity to expand. As an alternative to monetary support, entrepreneurs would usually grow and leverage their immediate, secondary, and tertiary networks for business and resource-related support. This would include signing various smaller and complementary partnerships to support the overall improvement process of the business.

Third Year in 1000 Days

Should the business reach its 3rd year, it generally indicates, at a minimum, a sound, and agile business model, a good product-market fit, a strong and growing customer base, as well as a powerful revenue stream/streams and good money/resource management. Typically, the business would approach its break-even point within its 3rd year – enabling the business to start generating profits, pay off debts, hire additional employees, as well as further improve elements throughout the business and improve/expand its existing product/service range.

During this period, entrepreneurs usually seek additional investment for further expansion – supporting the scaling milestones of the business, should the entrepreneur wish to transition out of the established stage of the business lifecycle.

During the 3rd year, the business has also solidified confidence in its brand identity and created a strong perception among its existing customers/clients regarding the overall quality of the business. Given the improvements made to the Customer Journey Map (CJM), overall customer experience, and satisfaction, the business would typically have created multiple loyal customers/clients and perhaps even advocates for the business. This serves as a strong foundation for organic marketing, given the ambassador-like roles these customers assume – promoting the business to their networks, naturally, given their positive experiences with the business to date.

Given that these customers/clients are your loyal advocates, they are generally the best source of feedback regarding required improvements throughout the business. Remember, there’s always room for growth.

These activities/growth cues are considered some of the primary and most important indicators of growth for your small business. Depending on the nature of your business and the composition of your offering, you’ll most probably be able to identify additional growth indicators and opportunities.

The key to identifying these growth indicators/cues is to both value and prioritize the analysis of insights flow through your business – from the inside-out to the outside-in. Every element, activity, and stakeholder within your business will be able to provide you with invaluable insights, and analyzing these insights will provide you and your team with the necessary ammunition to recognize redundant areas that are unnecessarily absorbing cash, as well as areas for improvement/innovation that could attract additional investment improvement.

So, why is the 1000-day principle significant?

Many entrepreneurs deem the 1st 1000 days the most critical period for a startup business. On average, it has taken approximately 3 years for startups to reach their break-even point and start generating profits.

When merging the 1000-day principle with the business lifecycle, the (1) 1st year and 2nd year is generally deemed the seed and startup stages, and the (2) 3rd year is deemed the growth stage – deeming the years beyond the established stage and foundation for prospective expansion.

Although the length of these stages and the 1000-day principle could be argued as relative, a business is usually heading for failure should it not transition through to the growth and established the phase.

Top Growth Tips

Ensure that your Customer / Client Journey Map (CJM) is optimized and that each touch-point / engagement point throughout is accounted for / enhanced, whilst listening to customer feedback platforms and leveraging insights gathered to adapt/improve your overall strategy. Through good money management, mind your cash burn rate. In other words, don’t spend your money on things that don’t benefit your business and customers. Rather leave the fancy / luxurious purchases for when your profits exceed your expenses and make do with the bare minimum in the beginning.

Learn how to manage your business through systems building and lead your employees accordingly, to ensure your business runs smoothly and that the natural talents, creativity, and business savvy of your employees are unleashed. Learn when / how to say no by embedding Ideas Management into your daily decision-making and sustainable business growth strategies, to gain access to innovative ideas, filter prospective failures, unleash your team’s potential, gain a competitive edge and keep your business moving forward. Don’t let your ego get in the way of your business’ progress – stay humble and patient.

strategy, win, to win-1080536.jpg

Throughout your entrepreneurial journey and your business lifecycle, you’ll be faced with a variety of challenges. How you perceive, approach, and overcome these challenges will depend on your mindset, passion, mission, and vision. You should see these challenges as opportunities to better yourself and your business. Build your confidence and tackle problems/challenges with vigor because there’s always room for improvement – no person or business is perfect.