Does your small business feel stagnant? Advice for jump-starting success in 2018

Does your small business feel stagnant? Advice for jump-starting success in 2018

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Once you’ve successfully established your small business, you’ve reached a major milestone in your professional life. You’ve successfully met a variety of crucial needs, like creating cost-effective workflows, building relationships with clients, managing workloads and many others. A small business strategy can give you clear direction for 2018.

However, you may also feel like your company isn’t growing as quickly or as strongly as you’d like it to. Sometimes, you might not know what’s next for your business after you build a strong foundation for it. You may also have a goal in mind, but not a clear path for how to reach it. If your small business feels stagnant, consider these tips for jump-starting growth and improving small business development:

Determine your small business strategy first

Small Business Strategy

You know your small business better than anyone else. If you can identify an area where you wish you had more presence or capability, that can be a strong foundation for targeted and effective growth.

Perhaps you’ve seen a trend of customers searching for a specific product over the past several months. That could mean increasing inventory is a prudent step forward. Maybe there’s a lot of specific construction work in your area, but you need a few specialized pieces of equipment to successfully bid for those jobs.

You may also want to increase awareness of your company through a variety of channels. One common issue facing small businesses in a variety of industries is market penetration. If you get strong, positive feedback from clients but want to boost business, marketing and engagement can bring in more customers.

Hiring staff, or more of them, is another possibility to consider. Whether they work on the sales floor or production line, more employees can mean longer hours of operation, more purchases and higher output. If you identify a need that can be filled by increased staffing, strongly consider growing your workforce.

No matter which specific track you choose, make sure you clearly identify a way that growth will allow your success thus far to continue. Without a plan involving a lot of thought and consideration, you may chase an idea that doesn’t lead to positive returns or isn’t practical at this point in the life of your small business.

Set goals and be ready to adapt

Goals are critical to charting the success of a strategy. It can be hard to choose exact figures or other checkpoints, so don’t worry if your goals for additional sales or increasing production are ranges and not exact numbers. The important thing is that you understand the general level your company needs to reach for your business development plans, and the money and time invested into them, to be worthwhile.

Being flexible is critical in this situation. If you’re seeing some results, but not at the level desired, examine your current strategy and look for ways to make changes. If your marketing efforts are drawing a new crowd but not a large enough one, for example, you might want to mix up the types of outreach used, and seek out new avenues for advertising and connecting with new potential customers.

Find funding

Getting the money you need for your desired plan for growth is vital to making those plans successful. Many small business owners can find it difficult to identify an effective, trustworthy and knowledgeable lending partner.

That’s where National Funding comes into play. With nearly two decades of history exclusively helping small businesses secure the funding they need to stabilize, grow and prosper, we know how to work with companies just like yours. To learn more about applying for a small business loan to drive your strategy for jump-starting success in 2018, get in touch with us today.

 

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