Can you grow your business by 33%

I was chatting to a client about her business and she asked about simple and effective growth strategies. It reminded me of one of the easy and cost effective ways to grow your business. Focus on a few of the obvious things that work. With an existing customer base that buys regularly and a decent range of products and/or services you can drive your business up by 33% and just carry on doing what you do, with a few minor changes in focus.

How many Customers (C) do you have? How many times each year do they place orders (O) with you? How much is your average gross profit (G) per order? With these 3 factors and your annual profit or targetted profit you can check you have the right baseline.

100 Customers x 3 Orders per year x £100 GP per order = £30,000

Three simple questions to ask yourself:-

How can you get more customers and keep the ones you have?
What can you do to get some more business from them each year?
What can be done to increase your average GP per order?

If you increase each by 10% the results are worthwhile.

110 Customers x 3.3 orders per year x £110 GP per order = £39930

An increase of 33%!

Obviously this is too simplistic and doesn’t reflect the real world we work in.

However if you introduced a newsletter and ran a referral or find a friend program then you would communicate your values and business better to your existing clients or customers. And just by asking then you may well get introduced to more clients that are similar to the ones you have already.

Next just ask your customers what else they would like or need from you. You may have complementary products already and you may think your customers know about them.  Ideally you have a range of  products and services that your customers know about and need. If not then maybe think about that too.

This is the ‘Would you like fries’ question. It’s worth £millions a day for Macdonalds, so is well proven. When someone is buying they are more likely to buy more if you ask or suggest  something at the point of sale. If you do it every time you will see a change.

In this particular case the £9930 increase would not cost much and would show a very attractive return on investment but that’s a different subject.

If you would like to try this and would like a reassuring chat then drop me an email at kevin@kevindjones.co.uk and I will try and help.