The providers featured in the Prowess 2.0 map support thousands of women in business. Here are their top 10 tips for business growth.
- Strengths. Build on your own and your organisation’s strengths and core competencies, shore up weaknesses, and develop a marketing strategy.
- Cash is king. Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality. Remember that growing turnover usually requires more working capital. Produce financial forecasts and make sure the resources are in place to cope with business expansion. Finance for women in business is a particular issue. Women’s businesses are capitalised to just one third of the level of their male counterparts and this is the key issue hampering their growth.
- Compete on quality. When you want to grow sales, don’t be too tempted to ‘buy’ turnover by offering discounts – better to add value and charge a premium price.
- Segment your market. Find out why your customers buy from you. Use this information to identify other groups of potential customers and send them a powerful sales message.
- The Pareto Principle. suggests that your 20% best customers will provide 80% of your revenues. Get to know these customers even better with a formal or informal survey and consider what more you can offer them.
- Planning. While considering the possibilities of expanding your markets, plan all four (strategic, financial, structural and organisational) categories of growth.
- Systems. Implement systems, policies and procedures (it sounds bureaucratic but it will help!)
- Structure. Make sure that you have the right legal structure in place to support your growth plans. You can review alternative structures at gov.uk or go online to form a California LLC.
- Adapt. Be open to changing the company’s processes, culture and attitudes as it grows and develops.
- Motivate. You can’t grow on your own! Make sure that you value, support and motivate your team.