How to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Getting started as a business in the UK isn't difficult, but creating the necessary growth to avoid the possibility of stagnation is paramount.

09:32 12 August 2019

Most small businesses never get much past the solopreneur stage. It’s necessary to do things a little differently to avoid the same fate. Here are some ideas on how to take your business to the next level.

Increase Business Trade Through Existing Customers

Many new deals aren’t completed because the company fails to ask for the sale. With marketing, it’s expensive to find your first customers and then the next ones after that. Go back to existing customers to follow-up with another sales offer. Whilst this won’t always result in a sale, if you ask the right questions, interesting answers often follow when paying attention.

With newer businesses with a limited product or service offering, it’s a reality that this restricts what customers can purchase from you. Trying to sell the same product repeatedly won’t work. Ask leading questions and let the customer discuss what their needs are. This often spurs an idea for a new product line that can be very successful. And the person who mentioned it may very well be your first customer.

Improve Product/Service Quality

The first version of a product is almost never the best one. The book needs a rewrite and the manufactured product can be refined based on early customer feedback. It’s never one and done.

By creating a new version with notable improvements, it provides a useful hook for your marketing efforts. Adverts can promote how the new version helps customers. Also, previous purchasers can be approached to see if they’d be interested in upgrading.

Look for New Markets

There’s a saying that any business that isn’t growing, is contracting. That’s almost always the case. Companies must be continually creating and testing new products in an attempt to get ahead of other UK competitors.

However, even the best product doesn’t do a business much good if few people have heard of it. In which case, they just buy an inferior one from a competitor. Marketing matters more than most business owners give it credit for.

To learn how to market better, or supervise people who work in this area, studying an online master’s degree UK based is a great idea to increase your marketing familiarity. A business qualification provides a deep knowledge in many aspects of running a company in the UK. It proves insight into what different people and departments will be responsible for within the company and judging their performance. An online master’s degree UK oriented can be studied online at your convenience too, so it doesn’t have to interfere with running your existing business either.

Create a Sellable Business from the Start

When growing your business, it’s always sensible to design it to be sold at a later date. This concept may seem off, but many UK business owners discover too late that what they’ve created will be difficult to sell to a likely buyer.

To position a business for a future sale, it helps to use a clear structure and document all processes. This makes it far easier to understand later. The Built to Sell parable written by John Warrillow provides some edutainment in this area and is a worthy read.

Resting on your laurels is not sensible as a business owner. Don’t be afraid to promote a little more like the Americans to get ahead. Take Sir Richard Branson as an example of this approach (you don’t have to be the frontperson with promotion). Think about providing value to each and every customer. Design products and develop services with that mindset to offer what customers have been looking for and were unable to find in the marketplace until now.