Sometimes building a highly profitable business is easier than it looks. We often think the answer to growing our company is working longer hours and doing much more work, but in my experience coaching hundreds of business leaders and entrepreneurs on growth, it’s often the really simple, easy steps that make the biggest difference.

With that in mind, here are six small things you can do, that together will make a huge improvement to how fast your company grows.

1. Find a richer customer

What product could you offer, especially for wealthier clients?

Strangely, people who are wealthier are often easier to sell to than those who are struggling financially. Opening the wallet doesn’t hurt as much. But if you don’t have something good to offer this richer style of customer you are leaving huge amounts of money on the table.

Remember also that a more expensive product usually means much higher margins for you, so while your revenue may increase say 20 per cent with this new upscale product, your profit at the end of the year may be much higher.

2. Develop a continuity business model

One of the most effective ways to quickly build your profits is to design a service or product that is continuously delivered. If you sell a service, this is usually achieved by selling a monthly retainer for ongoing work. If you sell a product it’s by getting customers to sign on for monthly or quarterly re-orders.

In the case of the latter, it is remarkable how you can turn almost anything you sell into a continuity model. Look on the internet and you’ll find highly successful monthly continuity models for clothes, gifts, advice, socks, meat, wine, DVDs, events and hundreds of other categories.

What could you offer that is delivered monthly or quarterly? This kind of recurring revenue is a mega opportunity to not only lift your revenues but keep them high year after year.

3. Reactivate old clients or leads

I have seen two of our business coaching clients (a builder and a tennis academy) get lucrative orders within hours of sending an email to their old list of leads/customers.

Think about it. Many of these people are still interested in what you offer, they just need to be reminded that you offer it. Re-activating your old enquiries and clients is one of the fastest ways of all to make your profit levels zoom. Be sure to do it every six months.

4. Do something to grow your customer base before 10am

You know how it goes. You have wonderful intentions to work on your sales and marketing but the urgent problems of the day soon take over and all of a sudden it’s 6pm and another day has gone without doing it.

There’s an easy way to fix this incredibly costly problem: work for an hour on sales and marketing as soon as you come into work each morning. Just one hour will make a massive difference to your company’s growth over three months – but it must be done each and every work day.

The best way to make it occur is firstly to diarise it and secondly to inform your staff (and if need be your clients and suppliers) that you’re not available until 10am each day. If you don’t do these two things my experience with coaching hundreds of entrepreneurs is that it won’t work.

5. Increase the speed and intensity of your daily work

Start acting with genuine urgency. If you usually have staff meetings that last an hour, do them in 30 minutes.

If you get into work at 9am, get in at 8am.

If you usually do five sales calls a week try doing five every day.

Then instill this sense of urgency into your staff and your key suppliers. So that everyone who works with you knows they have to lift their game higher than ever before.

Acting with urgency and great desire will massively change your results for the better.

6. Ask for money much more often

If your business is not growing quickly, a common reason is you are not asking enough people to buy from you, often enough.
There are numerous ways to ask for money in a business:

• You need to focus on bringing in more leads – via advertising, PR, joint ventures or the telephone.
• You need to increase the amount of meetings you have with people who can buy.
• And you need to create more reasons why somebody should buy from you – make them more offers, create new products or services, announce special short term discounts etc.
• If you reach out to a lot more people, with lots more offers and reasons to buy, you will inevitably get a lot more sales.

NOW IT’S UP TO YOU

I’ve now given you six highly effective strategies and can virtually guarantee that if you make them a central part of the way you operate, you will see a remarkable lift in your sales.

For more information visit thefortuneinstitute.com