Five Bullet-Proof Steps to Increase Small Business Success

Surprisingly, Many New Entrepreneurs Don’t Get It Right

Photo by stephen momot on Unsplash

It is simple and straightforward: Measure your revenue. Your revenue should tell you how you are doing. In a healthy business, revenue should grow by 1% — 3% every month and even more if you invest in advertising or targeted marketing and sales campaigns.

Yet as a business coach for early-stage entrepreneurs, I regularly get clients who are not measuring their success by their revenue. Instead, they are living on possibility, wishful thinking, or fake stories of overnight success they have sadly been influenced by. Here are some of the things I’ve heard business owners say:

“We bid on this really big deal and should hear back soon if we won.”

“We just launched our new website, so inquiries are going to explode.”

“I grew my social media following by 15–20%.”

“One of our posts went viral.”

“The get-rich-quick book I bought doesn’t say I need a business plan.”

While it is true that starting a business means trying many things, the only way you should measure success is by revenue. Here is how to organize in your business with the best conditions for generating strong revenue:

1/ Offer: Supply vs Demand

Develop branded product offerings that will be in high demand by knowing with confidence that you uniquely solve a problem for a very niche clientele whom you have carefully defined. Make sure you spend significant time with your ideal customers and have strong connections for feedback through beta testing, focus groups, and user communities before launching any offers. This is the point in time when you’ll want to write all of your branded, SEO-optimized copy and create branded assets for your Sales and Marketing, including setting up all online business profiles.

2/ Set Pricing Based on Market Research

Since you know your client so well and what other offerings exist in your market niche, setting pricing should be easy. With that said, any new product may require some split testing and adjustments until you figure out…