I’m going to go through the 2 primary ways I look at growing a company. We’ll talk about identifying and resolving problem areas, freeing up time and resources, and then finding leverage points to gain maximum traction and the biggest gains with small incremental improvements.

But before we start with that, you have to understand your numbers...

There’s this story of the business owner who wanted to grow their business, and the most obvious and logical place to start is by increasing your revenue or sales, right? Well they went ahead and did just that. Generated more revenue, the same way they had been doing for a while.

In a pretty short space of time, they realized that they were actually losing more and more money, profits plummeted, and in fact started running at a loss. They couldn’t understand why this was happening, revenue was up and things were supposed to be going better, not worse.

The problem is, the margins were too low, and they were effectively losing money on every sale, and so the more revenue they brought in, the more money they were losing.

The point is, you need to know your most critical numbers to start, so that you can make informed decisions on where to focus your time and energy.

Ok, so what are the most ciritcal numbers you may ask? I’ll give you a quick overview of these. This is just at a very high level, and we’ll go much deeper into this at a later stage.

Think of your business as a system shaped like a funnel. I’m sure you’ve heard the term funnel a lot by now… You’re going to be bringing in prospects or potential leads into the top of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel is your profit.

Let me draw this out for you real quick.

Get clarity on these numbers, and then we’re ready to pick the route to our first task of scaling and growing the business.

In my view, the best way to grow your business is for you as the owner to only work on the highest leverage tasks, the tasks that have the most impact and generate the most profitable revenue, and constantly look to free up your time spent doing anything else.

I want you to consider this question, really think about it for a minute - where are you spending most of your time in your business, constantly putting out fires?

This may be on your customer service, or marketing, maybe your admin. Is the time you’re working in this area the highest leverage work you could be doing? Is it making a difference to any of those key numbers we identified earlier? My guess is probably not…

Or you’re really lucky, oblivious, or have managed to work your way past some of these pain points already, well done :)

Ok so this comes right back to the start, where I mentioned 2 primary ways to grow your business. The first is to take a step back from the problem area where you’re spending so much of your time. Then ask yourself, is this even something that the business needs? Could you just stop doing this altogether? If you can, then stop it. Stop doing this now, and move on.

If it is something that’s required, then instead of fixing the issues, or putting out fires, you need to fix the underlying cause of these issues. This might mean implementing a clear process, it could be hiring someone or even a team to run that process, or better training for your team.

By doing this, you start to free up your time and energy, and you’ll actually be more effective and solving whatever the issue is.

Now you can get back to looking at those critical numbers, and start working through each of them to make adjustments and improvements.

I like to look at each of these critical numbers and ask, how can we improve by just 10% on each step in the funnel? And don’t think that means how can you get your conversion rate from 10% to 20%. No, I mean a 10% improvement on the number. So if your conversion rate is 10% now, a 10% improvement brings it up to 11%. Its a small incremental change. But if you do this at every step, it has a massive compounding effect on your bottom line.