THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT BUSINESS SUCCESS: STRATEGIES EVERY ENTREPRENEUR NEEDS TO KNOW WHEN GROWING THEIR BUSINESS - PART 1
If you’re an entrepreneur wanting to grow your business from a side hustle or a hobby into an actual business, you’re in the right place! Today, I’ll take you through the three must-have strategies you need to start implementing in your business right now to set yourself up for future success.
Before we dive in, let’s set the scene. You’re early in your entrepreneurial journey, and in the beginning stages, you’re inundated with information about what you should and shouldn’t be doing. “Get on TikTok,” “Build an email list,” “Create a signature program,”…the list goes on and on.
Sound familiar?
But here’s the thing—starting any one of those things without a clearly defined strategy is a recipe for disaster and burnout (ask me how I know…). In working with my clients, I’ve found that one of the most common issues arises when they start in the wrong order when launching a product or service, leading to burnout, exhaustion, and low sales before they gain any real traction.
The secret sauce isn’t creating the perfect product right off the bat, making the all-important shift from “learning mode” to taking action in your business, or even creating that “business plan.” Instead, it’s learning how to implement these three core strategies: business, marketing, and sales.
Are you ready to learn how to do this the right way? Keep on reading, my entrepreneurial friend!
CRAFTING A WINNING BUSINESS STRATEGY
The biggest mistake most early entrepreneurs make is jumping right into marketing strategy without first looking at their business strategy. We’ll take a closer look into what marketing strategy is all about in the next section, but first, let’s understand what business strategy means.
Business strategy refers to the overarching plan and long-term vision you use to achieve your objectives, create a competitive advantage, and ensure sustainable growth for your business. It encompasses all aspects of the business, including finance, operations, management, and product development. Having a business strategy in place helps you to optimally allocate your resources, identify market opportunities, and navigate potential challenges.
CONDUCTING COMPETITIVE MARKET RESEARCH
One of the critical components of your business strategy is to conduct competitive market research. You can do this by seeking out other entrepreneurs in your niche serving your target demographic. Your goal here is to research their products and pricing so that you know what else is out there (and what else your target audience is probably seeing in their advertisements).
Then, once you have some baseline information about this, you can start to recognize additional unmet needs in the current market. You can use this information to help formulate your own product development strategy by recognizing what is called “market opportunity” (aka identifying the gaps in the market and then working to fill them with your products and services).
BETA TESTING YOUR IDEAS
Another part of your business strategy involves beta testing your ideas and those you’ve identified as gaps in your market research. Beta testing is when you present a product, service, or even just a concept to a small audience to gauge their level of interest and garner feedback. This can be as simple as conducting polls on social media, speaking to people in person, and casually asking them if they have an interest in a particular topic (if you do this, make sure to keep track of how many people you talk to and what their responses are), or to offer your product or service at a reduced rate in exchange for their feedback (and often also a testimonial).
The key to beta testing is to find out what your target audience actually wants before spending your time, energy, and resources creating something that may not sell. It’s important to focus on solving real problems for your target audience, not just creating products or offering services. You can create the most amazing product in the world, but if it doesn’t solve a problem your audience is struggling with, you won’t make many sales.
CREATING YOUR REVENUE FORECAST
The next component in your business strategy is your revenue forecast. Competitor research is helpful to establish a rough idea of what the industry will support for pricing, but now you need to do some napkin math and calculate how many products or services you would need to sell to generate your ideal revenue. Don’t forget to take into account your “assumed” retention rate (i.e., how many clients come back for more) versus your new client acquisition (how many new buyers you have).
After you build your revenue forecast, you’ll need to figure out your monthly business expenses, considering that some of your expenses will grow over time (anything related to the production of the product or service, including bringing on a team). Doing this will help you to create some key benchmark assumptions for your business that you can use to measure your progress. A few examples of benchmarks you can track are:
The number of each product sold.
The number of repeat buyers.
The direct expenses required to attract a new client (either through organic or paid marketing efforts).
Thanks for reading this far. Come back for part two. In the meantime, sign up for my newsletter to get notified first about new blogs, freebies, and more.