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By: Samantha Hogg-Brandjes, Founder and CEO of GinjaNinja
It’s been 21 years since I started my own business and while we have been celebrating this incredible milestone, it is not lost on me that it has been one of the hardest things I have ever done and continue to do. When I reflect on how the business survived, what I did or how we approached it, I realise that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Growth is not linear, nor is it even annual. It is a tricky beast and there are ways to try to manage the process better and plan for a growth trajectory.
Anyone can do it!
There is no secret recipe for business success, nothing inaccessible to any entrepreneur, no silver bullet. You need grit, determination, bravery, and a compelling product or service, and most importantly, you need to be exceptionally consistent. Like all things in life, the more you stick to something, the harder you try, the greater the reward. This does understandably depend on the strength of the business opportunity, which brings me to what I think is often missing in small businesses and their growth.
Strategise your path to growth
Strategy. Just because you are a small business doesn’t mean you can’t act like a big one, and have a business plan, strategic focus and monthly reporting that gives you a dashboard view of your progress, or of your challenge. Having invested in a business coach for years, I often wondered how I ran the business without it.
The building years
In the decades of running a business and working with countless entrepreneurs and startups, I have observed that a strategic imperative is often missing. The management run the business with knee-jerk reactions and don’t spend enough time looking up or back. Numbers don’t lie. You need a constant view of business progress and how this supports the bigger picture that you have for your business. If you don’t have one, then that’s where you need to start. What is the dream for your business? What is the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG)? You must have one and you need to be able to vividly describe it to anyone. It should blow your socks off with excitement as well as challenge you. Next is questioning if the business possesses the core values needed to achieve this ideology and if yes, what actions will it take to bring this to life.
Know who you are targeting, what you are offering each segment, your geographic reach, distribution channels and strategic partners. At this point, I am guessing that the average entrepreneur would be frustrated believing that they don’t have time for this rigmarole, but, and it is a big but, this can be done very quickly if the business has a strategic imperative. It all lives in your head, it is just a matter of documenting it. It is impossible to measure or track progress if you don’t have a starting point and a plan. My business coach from Grow has an incredible template that makes this entire process pain free.
What makes you different?
Having a unique selling point (USP) is vital. What differentiates you from your competitors will aid you in winning business over them. You need at least three USPs that link back to your BHAG as well as having the competency to achieve your plans for the period. As an entrepreneur you must be able to list five key competencies that drive the core of the business.
It’s all in the plans and processes
It seems tedious, but a lack of strategy, process and plans is, in my opinion, why so many small businesses do not succeed. The adage of ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ could not be truer. Thankfully, I adore strategy and loved every minute of learning how to strategically run the business. It helped me address the weaknesses I had as a leader, taught me countless lessons as an entrepreneur and most importantly, it empowered me more than anything else to grow the business. I followed the processes, broke through my fear of numbers, addressed the details and I could immediately see the results. You don’t need to have been to business school or have several degrees to run a successful small business. It simply comes down to how you approach it, manage it and try to grow it.
It is never too late to strategically build and run your business.
Samantha Hogg-Brandjes is the Founder and CEO of GinjaNinja, a PR, integrated marketing, and communications.
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