My small business is several years old now and revenue has been flat for the last 2 years. There’s a good amount of profit and I’m not complaining, but I would really like to see the business continue to grow and not just stay flat at the same level.
We have $15k which isn’t needed for anything else and could theoretically be invested in growing/scaling the business, but I’m not sure how. We already sell internationally. We already have pitched our service to nearly everyone in our niche industry. We have the capacity to handle more clients but our marketing efforts are already maxed out. All the low-hanging fruit is gone and we’re struggling to find new ways to grow.
The business sells professional services online B2B and B2C.
Any ideas?
Spend the money to survey your customers and potential customers as to the quality of your offering and what you could do better and/or solve additional problems for them in your niche.
You can write this off as r&d or marketing depending on how you structure it.
What is work that you can delegate? 20% of our efforts achieve 80% of the results.
Using the 80-20 rule, you can identify which work is useful, but not critical. Use your funds to outsource this work. This will open up time to study more areas and plan further expansions.
Another option is to hire the appropriate minds that can think outside of the box to tap into new niches and convert at higher rates.
Best Regards,
Landon
I write a new business plan each year using the premis; what went right, what went wrong, how can we improve…from there you will answer a lot of your own questions.
Here are some ideas, I’m afraid this will be generic without knowing more about the business.
- You said you pitched everyone in your niche industry. Are you actively nurturing that audience, repitching, and staying top of mind? What works well in sales and marketing are constantly changing so are you experimenting with new channels or ways to engage with your buyers?
- Are there new products or services you can bundle or upsell to your current customers?
- Consider your bottom line too, are there areas you can improve efficiency or automate to get better profit margin?
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can you raise the prices? do you have a captive market?
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are there other businesses that can benefit from the workflow you have setup? I don’t know about intricacies about selling professional services, but can it be applied to selling anything else? Do you have a unique proposition that is transferrable to other niches?
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what about acquiring a competitor? $15k might not be enough for that, but you can use stock or leverage
Vladimir
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