Growth levers
It’s easy to start doing things that feel productive but don’t help you achieve your growth goals.
If you’re feeling pulled in a lot of different directions or you just can’t seem to hit your revenue or profit goals, you probably need to evaluate whether you’ve selected the right growth levers and sufficiently invested enough time and money to get the results you want.
In other words, growing your business requires you to know
what your growth goals are (revenue and profit targets)
what strategies you are going to use to achieve those goals such as increased market size, geography, average sale size, number of customers, number of purchases per customer, new products, etc.
how much money, human capital and other resources are available, and
what growth lever(s) (i.e. growth tactics) you want to use to achieve growth (marketing, sales, product development, product iteration, customer experience activities, etc.) - turn your strategy into actions that drives results.
There are lots of ways to increase revenue. By evaluating and choosing the method that is best for your company you can focus your time, energy, and money on specific tasks. Be effective, not just busy.
This allows you to stay the course as uncertainty and ambiguity tempt you to throw the kitchen sink at achieving your goal.
And, because you’ve evaluated the different strategies available to you, you can assess the effectiveness of the strategy you’ve selected and pivot as new information is available.
The ability to be resilient and reorient activities to stay aligned to achieving your desired end result is critically important.
But first you need to figure out what business lever(s) you’ll use. You then pick a strategy for deploying that lever.
Please note: I hesitate to put the ‘s’ in parentheses - for almost every small business it's in your best interest to focus on deploying one lever at a time, with full commitment and focus.
Business Levers for Growth
So what’s a business lever?
It’s an organized approach to solving a business problem (or maximizing a business opportunity) that allows you to drive growth.
What lever(s) you use depends on your market, industry and business model.
No one can write an article that will help you sort through all possible levers and tell you which one to use to grow your business. However, they commonly involve deploying some combination of money, people, processes, time, products/services, or technology to grow. The lever you choose should be based on 1) available data (internal and external) and 2) analysis of your capacity and capability to execute.
Sources of data:
Customer feedback
Financial analytics
Marketing analytics
Sales analytics
Industry trends
Pilot projects
Capacity and Capability:
Who
What
When
How
With what money
Examples of Levers:
Sell a new product/service to
Existing customers
New customers
Through new channels
Sell more current products/services to
Existing customers
New customers
Through new channels
Strategic pricing
Improve the customer experience
Align sales and marketing
Reduce waste and rework
Retain your people
Train your people
You’re looking for levers that can create the growth in ways that are sustainable. Top line growth alone won’t necessarily grow the bottom line long term.
Pro tip: Focus on levers that increase profit not just revenue.
Still feels a little overwhelming, right?
In my experience, it's always helpful to get an outside perspective. Someone with fewer emotional ties to certain strategies and less bias about specific choices.
Working with a trusted advisor, someone solely focused on helping you achieve success as you’ve defined it, can bring clarity and peace of mind to business decisions.
That’s not a luxury.
You deserve to feel calm and confident as a business owner.
