Let’s make “GROW” your favorite four-letter word.
Ready to take your business to the next level? It helps to have an experienced business growth strategist on your team.
With more than 30 years of experience as a business owner, operator, and consultant, Mark Guinn at Rock Bridge Solutions can help you develop and implement practical that drive growth.
Operations Efficiency
It’s not as exciting as marketing or sales, but daily operations are the backbone of your business. If this isn’t running as smoothly as it should, everything else will suffer. Unnecessary steps in your sales flow process will increase the time spent moving a lead to conversion, and it could even cost you the sale if they become frustrated. Too much paperwork can create bottlenecks in your team’s communication, creating confusion and the potential for a great customer to get lost in the shuffle. An outdated form could be keeping you from important information that helps you grow. Too many levels of the administrative hierarchy can cause delayed or vague response to the needs of customers or team members. Remember the old saying, “time is money.” You can’t afford to waste either one.
Depending on the issues your business is currently facing, these may feel like minor issues that can be addressed later. However, it’s not uncommon to discover many of those issues can be resolved by making small improvements to your daily operations. For example, one of my clients was having problems with potential customers dropping off in the middle of the sales process. We discovered the majority of losses occurred after they were asked to complete a necessary information form. Needless to say, this was killing their sale pipeline. The solution was to shorten the form, only asking for information that was needed at that point in the sales process. The other information could be acquired during the close of sale. This decreased the lead dropoff by more than 30%, giving the sales team more opportunities to convert.
In another example, a client had a multi-step closing process that involved several members of the administrative team in addition to the salesperson. Important information was being lost or miscommunicated, customers weren’t sure who to contact, and no one on the team could confirm where they were in the closing process. The team members were stepping over each other, with some steps being redundant while others were accidentally omitted. The customer got lost in the shuffle. By reducing the number of team members involved and properly organizing each person’s task list and timeline, we were able to make this a much smoother closing process with both the customer and the team members feeling more satisfied with the sale.
Small changes like these can make a big difference in the success of your business. When your operational processes are efficiently designed, your team members will be more productive which means you’ll be able to close more sales in same amount of time.
Marketing Strategies
Operations is the backbone of your business, but marketing is the muscle that makes everything move. Businesses thrive when they’re consistently connecting with new customers. Having a strong marketing strategy specifically designed for your business will help you make those new connections, and cultivate your relationship with your existing customers.
The first step to creating the right marketing strategy for your business is to know your target audience. By accurately defining your ideal customer, you’ll be better equipped to pinpoint the right channels to increase your reach. Not every channel is right for every business (can you imagine a funeral home starting a Tik Tok challenge?) so it’s important to focus your marketing budget on the channels that will reach your audience where they live. Your marketing strategy should include a combination of relevant channels, each with a budget optimized to create as many conversions as possible. We’ll work together to identify your audience, and then choose the best way to put your business in front of them.
Once that’s decided, it’s vital to ensure your branding is properly aligned with your audience. Branding is more than just a logo and tagline. It’s your business’s personality. Sure, looks are important so we’ll be sure the logo, fonts, and colors are the right fit. However, it’s important to define the tone, or the voice, of your business. Do you want your written content to be fun and edgy? Should you sound more professional, or maybe present as a luxury brand? This is all decided by defining your target audience, and it all plays a part in effective marketing.
Leadership Coaching
There’s a big difference between being a manager and being a leader. It’s easy to fall into the management trap because, as a business owner, you’re playing so many roles throughout the day. Focusing on numbers, making all of the big decisions, paying the bills… It can be so overwhelming that we forget that our team members are actually people. If you want your business to survive and grow, you’ll need to keep your people happy.
Train your people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
-Richard Branson
Your people will either be your business’s greatest asset or worst liability. Your business’s success depends on your willingness to invest in them. Monetary investments in the tools they use are good, but your greatest investment will be your time and effort. Every day, your actions set the standard as far as work ethic, attention to detail, willingness to help your team, and encouragement.
It’s your responsibility to create a transparent, positive, and supportive culture that your people can thrive in. We’ll work together to uncover better ways for you to lead by example, support your people through training, and finding opportunities for your people to lean more into their strengths instead of just compensating for their weaknesses. This is your chance to become the boss you wanted before you started your business.
Crisis Management
At some point, every business owner finds themselves dealing with a crisis that could potentially shutter the doors. It happens to the best of us: cash flow has suddenly dropped to a trickle and there’s not enough to make payroll and keep the lights on, a production flaw has given you a bad reputation among your customers, over time your sales process has gone stagnate and you didn’t recognize the problem until it felt like it was too late. Whatever the situation may be, we’ve all been there at least once (probably more times than we’d like to admit). It’s not the end of the world, but you do need to make corrections quickly.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the fact that, during times like this, each problem seems to compound itself and create more problems. It’s a snowball effect where you start to feel like there’s no way out of this mess. It helps to have someone on your team that can not only provide an outside perspective, but also has decades of experience dealing with these issues. As a business growth strategist, as well as a current business owner and former CEO and COO, I’ve found my businesses in crisis several times through the years. I know the added stress and anxiety this can cause, and understand that feeling of hopelessness that comes when you can’t see a way out of this. But it is possible to pull your business out of crisis and get back on track. We’ll work together to find the root causes, and quickly and decisively make changes to regain profitability.