60 Ways to Grow Your Business

It’s easy to spend every day tackling a long to-do list and checking items off a list. It’s a lot harder to step away from your day-to-day workload and think of new ideas that will actually change the course of your business. If you’ve been grinding away at the same to-do list every day with minimal growth, it might be time to try to something new.
Since new ideas aren’t always easy to come by, here’s a list of possible actions to spark the next phase of your company:

Ways to improve your business strategy:

1. Introduce new products or services to diversify your offerings
2. Research new needs or pain points in your market
3. Host a “trial run” of a new product or service before launching it officially
4. Find a new market to target for additional sales
5. Re-evaluate your business plan with 9 simple questions

Ways to market your business:

1. Leverage marketing automation tools
2. Invest in paid advertising
3. Audit your site’s SEO and implement small changes to support better search results
4. Set up a Google business profile
5. Start a blog
6. Use email marketing to keep customers engaged
7. Develop a co-marketing campaign with other local businesses
8. Change the time or frequency that you’re already posting on your blog
9. Use a new social media channel, or introduce a second account on a social media platform
10. Change the time or frequency of posts on your social media accounts

Ways to update your brand:

1. Simplify the way you speak about your business
2. Change the tone of all of your marketing efforts – should you be more personal, professional, young, old, etc.?
3. Introduce a new logo and color scheme
4. Redesign your website or introduce a new website

Ways to introduce new equipment

1. Buy new equipment to produce your products or facilitate your service
2. Update your technology, including computers and software
3. Implement a new, simpler point-of-sale system

Ways to improve your bottom line:

1. Stop accepting cash
2. Seek additional funding with a small business loan
3. Crowd-fund a new product or location for your business
4. Hire an accountant to help understand the numbers
5. Reduce the costs of running your company

Ways to make your customers happy:

1. Ask for customer feedback
2. Create a customer loyalty program
3. Implement a customer management system
4. Get listed in local directories
5. Set up a Yelp profile and ask for customer reviews online

Ways to improve your sales:

1. Offer a sale on less popular items
2. Sell seasonal items for specific holidays or times of the year
3. Bundle items in a special offer to increase overall sales
4. Explicitly ask your clients or customers for referrals
5. Bill clients sooner or re-evaluate your payment terms

Ways to find help:

1. Hire a small business coach
2. Join a meetup group with other small business owners
3. Get involved with your local chamber of commerce
4. Outsource some of your workload
5. Hire an intern or temporary employee to add manpower to your team

Ways to engage in your community

1. Ask your community to join you for a local event
2. Host a networking event to build good will for your business
3. Sponsor a fundraiser to drum up a positive reputation in your community
4. Showcase support for local non-profits on your site or in your brick-and-mortar location
5. Offer a good-will program to make your business accessible to those in need

Ways to manage your time:

1. Set realistic expectations for each day’s to-do list
2. Prioritize each day around a specific theme, like marketing or finance
3. Only tackle 3 major projects in a day
4. Delegate to team members or partners
5. Change your working or open hours to times when you’re more productive
6. Take time off or leave the office early

Ways to learn something new:

1. Find out what the competition is doing
2. Read (and save) popular small business blogs
3. Listen to business-oriented podcasts
4. Discover the power of audiobooks
5. Attend a workshop to hone your skills and network
6. Read up on your business idols
7. Start a journal to reflect on your journey as a small business owner and address daily challenges

Regardless of the stage of your business, there’s a lot to be done to help your company thrive. What are you doing to achieve results?