5 Levels of
SMB Growth

A business needs to have a clear sense of purpose if it is to succeed. This purpose needs to be articulated in a document that sets out the mission, vision, values, and unique selling proposition of the company.

Your mission, vision, values, and unique selling proposition (USP) are the foundation of your business. Your mission is why your business exists; your vision is how you want to serve your customer base; your values are what drive you towards continuous improvement. Your USP is what sets you apart from the competition and compels your ideal customers to do business with you instead of them. Articulating these things clearly and persuasively removes risk and allows you to break away from the noise.

Codifying your mission, vision, values, and USP is critical to the success of your business. Without it, there would be confusion and chaos, and progress would be impossible to achieve. This document will guide all decision-making within the company and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal.

But of course this needs to be a living document. These ideas might change very rarely but fixing them in cement for all of eternity is a guaranteed way to make yourself obsolete as the market evolves over time.

As the business owner, be sure you are working with trusted partners who can help you stay focused on what you all have agreed upon when times are tough but wise enough to help you make the right pivot when it's time to adapt to new information.

Every business, large or small, exists in a competitive market. To be successful, businesses must offer more value to their customers than the competition while also striving to operate at a lower cost. In other words, businesses must find a way to do more with less. This is where strategy comes in. A good business strategy explains how a company plans to compete and thrive in a crowded market. It is the road map that businesses use to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the market.

Your business strategy should be an evolving plan that takes into consideration how you will build a partnership with your suppliers and vendors to add value to your customers while differentiating your offering from your competition. This will include the practical elements such as your long-range objectives, short-range key results, and critical performance indicators to measure progress so that your team moves together as one. And it will also include the qualitative components, such as your mission, vision, and values, that drive excitement from everyone on the team.

By taking a holistic approach to your business strategy, businesses can increase their chances of success and ensure that they are always one step ahead of the competition.

Financial modeling is a common tool used in business to make projections about potential outcomes. These projections can take many forms, but they all answer the question, “What are you going do with this money that we’re about to give you?” Lenders, investors, and other business stakeholders often rely on financial modeling to make decisions about whether or not to provide funding and other resources.

Any successful business operator will tell you that having a set of reliable financial documents is essential to running a successful company. Good financial projections will forecast discretionary cash flow, identify required working capital, and demonstrate the company’s ability to service debts and deliver a return on investment. Without this critical financial information, it would be very difficult to make sound decisions about how to allocate resources and grow the business.

Business plans and business models are two terms that are often used interchangeably, but they are actually quite different.

A business model is the broad conceptualization of how your company will create and deliver value to your customer. The business model provides an abstract framework for making decisions about what types of relationships and delivery channels are needed. Think of this as an architect’s picturesque rendering of a proposed new building.

A comprehensive business plan, on the other hand, is a document that outlines the detailed goals and objectives of a company, as well as the strategies and tactics that will be used to achieve them. The business plan is the culmination of all three previous components. Think of the business plan as the construction blueprints of a building.

You and your team need to review both of these documents at minimum on a quarterly basis to make sure you are still staying on track or to make adjustments if conditions in the market have changed.

Operating budgets offer a multifaceted perspective to cutting expenses. Naturally, your business requires capital to stay in operation, but you don’t want to wastefully spend tons of cash while relentlessly selling enough to cover your essential costs. The key is to find the right balance between spending and income.

Operating budgets offer a clear picture of your business’s financial health, highlighting where money is being spent and where cuts can be made. They also provide a roadmap for how your business should operate on a day-to-day basis. By carefully tracking income and expenses, you can make informed decisions about where to cut costs and how to boost revenue.

Marketing is an essential part of any business. Investing in marketing enables you to reach a larger audience and generate more interest in your products or services. Marketing can also increase revenue per customer by creating perceived value in the minds of those who buy.

Marketing and sales are two distinct but often overlapping disciplines. Marketing is focused on creating awareness of a brand or product. Sales is focused on cultivating relationships with those who have some brand awareness and converting them into customers.

For this reason, marketing and sales must work closely together to ensure that the right message is being communicated to the right people at the right time. It’s still up to your management decisions on how to coordinate information and resources between those two functions if you want them both to execute in a way that delivers the highest possible ROI.

In business, everything starts with sales. Without customers, you have no revenue and no business. To get customers in this challenging market environment, you need an aggressive and measurable plan to increase your leads, improve your sales conversion rates, and increase your annual revenue per customer.

You need a practical system for building a top-performing sales force. Scripting the interaction touch points and managing the team’s activity with a CRM are both essential for keeping track of progress and making sure every opportunity is maximized.

It is important to measure your results regularly so that you can adjust your plan as needed. You need data to tell you how every ratio is performing in the entire sales cycle. Tying paychecks to results is a great way to keep your team motivated.

Free cash flow is an important metric for evaluating a company’s financial health. It shows how much cash the company has available to reinvest in growth or pay back creditors. Unlike net income, free cash flow includes spending on equipment and assets, as well as changes in working capital from the balance sheet.

Changes in free cash flow can also be a leading indicator of impending business risk. By wrapping your mind around this key indicator, you can make better decisions for the future of your business.

The most important part of any business are the people that run it. Having a reliable system for placing team members in roles that best suit their strengths, and building them into a powerfully cohesive and committed team that delivers results, is essential for success.

First, identify the specific roles that need to be filled. Next, find individuals with the right skillset and personality fit. Finally, provide opportunities for team members to bond and build trust with one another.

Once you get going, how do you know if you are staying on target or if you have drifted off course? You need a system for measuring and reporting the critical numbers in your business so everyone knows how their efforts are either making or breaking your business.

This can be done by setting up KPIs (key performance indicators) and tracking financial metrics. Additionally, get feedback from customers and employees regularly to gauge how well your business is doing. Regularly review your business plan to make sure that your goals are still relevant and that you are taking the necessary steps to achieve them.

In any business, your people are your most important asset. It’s essential to have a team that works hard and is motivated to do their best work. One way to help ensure that you keep your best talent is to have an incentive plan in place that rewards exceptional performance.

Incentive plans can take many different forms, but some common elements include financial bonuses, paid time off, and recognition at company-wide events. Whatever form they take, incentive plans can be a powerful tool for keeping your best people on your team.

As the business world becomes increasingly competitive, it’s more important than ever to have a solid plan for attracting and retaining top talent. A practical plan should include generating more leads than you need, screening out non-performers, and using a skills-based test-drive process and psychometrics to choose team members that deliver results.

No matter how much energy and effort you put into the front end of your hiring process, no candidate will ever be 100% perfect for the role. So, you need to help each of them grow into their role.

You need a proven process for avoiding mis-hires by using assessment tools to evaluate and de-select candidates based on position-specific benchmarks. And you need a way to understand how each employee’s unique characteristics complement the needs of the team.

In life, time is our most precious commodity. Once it’s gone, we can never get it back. The key to success is to invest our time wisely by blocking high-value activities into a default calendar as appointments and holding ourselves accountable for executing them on time.

If someone calls in sick and someone else has to do their job, it’s helpful to have a well-written, detailed procedure to follow. If your people know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and how not to do it wrong, you can save a lot of time and effort and reduce frustration.

Writing good procedures takes time and effort, but it is worth it when you see the results. Your people will be happier and your organization will run more smoothly. So next time your team is struggling with a task or feeling frustrated by a repeated mistake, that’s an indication that it’s time to draft a new procedure and add it to your training library.

Meetings help teams to stay on track and ensure that everyone is on the same page. However, meetings can also be a huge time sink. One way to make this process easier is to set up regular meetings — scheduling them in advance for a specific day and time with a consistent agenda.

Having a consistent agenda helps to ensure that the meeting will be productive and focused. Setting regular meetings also avoids any confusion about when they will take place.

Simply making money is not enough to ensure the long-term viability of a business. In order to be successful, businesses need to make a profit. And this profit comes from eliminating waste in time, material, and movement.

By streamlining operations and cutting production costs, businesses can compete more effectively and achieve lasting success. Elevate the ideas that eliminate waste to the top of your priority stack.

A well-coordinated team of specialists can outperform any other group, provided there is a detailed plan in place to clarify reporting relationships. An organizational chart helps to establish who is responsible for what, while job descriptions ensure that work gets done efficiently and that the business can sustain long-term growth.

If anything, it is even more important for small businesses to have leaders on their team. With fewer employees, each one has that much more weight, responsibility, and impact on the success of the business.

As your business grows, you will need to help people learn how to be leaders. Some of the most effective approaches include offering leadership training programs, encouraging employees to take on additional responsibilities, and providing opportunities for advancement.

Succession planning is an essential part of any business’s growth strategy. There are many reasons why you might need to consider succession planning, including retirement, the sale of the business, or a change in your role within the company.

Having a succession plan in place will give confidence to outside investors, partners, customers, and the internal team that business continuity will not be disrupted. Some of the most important considerations include identifying key personnel, training and development programs, and establishing communication protocols.

Now that your business is running smoothly, you have an important decision to make: whether to sell the business or scale it up. Both options have pros and cons, and there is no right or wrong answer. It ultimately depends on your personal goals and preferences.

Growing a business is maximizing one key metric at a time, putting out fires that effort has created, and then repeating that cycle. Scaling a business is completely different — it means increasing throughput, reducing inventory, and reducing operating expenses, all simultaneously.

In other words, you need to increase net profit while simultaneously increasing return on investment while simultaneously increasing cash flow.

Scaling your business to the enterprise level may be your ambition, but to achieve it, you will need new ways of thinking, different decision-making models, and possibly a complete redesign of your organizational structure. Remember, what got you here will not get you to the next level.