Key Steps Along the Path to Growth

There are many key decisions that business owners need to make along their journey to grow their company. Usually, there are five major areas that tend to be the big hurdles that need a lot of work and are hard to overcome:

1. Transitioning into a sales organization. Hiring your first sales person is a challenge. Managing sales people is an adventure. Running a sales organization is mind numbing, but if you don’t make sales, you won’t have a business.

2. Supporting your sales team with quality and consistent marketing. There has to be a system in place to keep bringing people to your shop – whether that’s a local ad campaign, social media marketing, or efforts by your Service Advisors or other salespeople to reach out to existing customers. Your sales team will have a hard time selling repairs without some sort of marketing plan in place to back them up!

3. Building process and actually executing them. It really is the 3 P’s – process, policy, and procedure. You can’t grow without a consistent plan in place regarding how your business will operate day after day.

4. Developing a leadership team. This is necessary in a lot of areas, but once you reach a certain point there is not nearly enough “you” to go around. When you grow to the point of needing to build practices, you need leaders. When you begin to hand off responsibility for areas of the business, you need leaders. Your management team needs to be built with – you guessed it – leaders.

5. Building strategic relationships. Many business owners seem to believe that vendors are the enemy. The reality is, I know of no successful growing company who takes that approach. Sure you can grow to a point all on your own, but good relationships with your vendors can provide you a competive advantage in the marketplace.

Are you successful in these areas? Comment below!