Happy new year to you – may it be full of light, revenue, and wonderfully lovely clients.
To start the year off right, let’s look at some business fundamentals, starting with the Three Stages and Ingredients of Business Growth.
Each business goes through three distinct stages of growth, and each stage brings its own ingredients.
The stages are Set Up, Grow Up, and Scale Up. (click here to download a cheat sheet of the stages and their ingredients)
It’s important to be aware of the stage your business is in, and which ingredients belong to that stage.
Even more important is avoiding accidental sabotage, which is easily caused by using ingredients that belong in a different stage.
For example:
It’s a fool’s errand to use the scale-up ingredient “add new products” if you’re still getting clear on the set-up ingredient “define ideal customer profile”.
Then again, sometimes things change in your business or in the marketplace, which can require that you go back to ingredients from previous stages.
For instance, one of my business partners is currently redesigning a number of things in her business.
And while she’s been in business for many years, and in Stage 3 (Scale up), the redesign requires that she conduct customer research – i.e. an ingredient from Stage 1 (Set up).
This – the ability to see which ingredient is required at which stage – is foundational to any thriving business.
Things aren’t static, you’ll never reach any kind of ‘set & forget’ status in business.
Things will always change or break, and it’s on you as the business owner to decide which ingredient you choose, in order to fix or remedy it.
So now that I have this case on my hands, obviously I’m creating content for my business partner, so that she has all the instructions and checklists she needs in order to do her research, and get clear on exactly who her ideal client is for this next phase in her business.
And now that I have this little app I’m building, I can add that content to the library – a pleasant little piece of synergy and leverage:
My partner feeds me a need for materials, I create them and feed them into my app, and any business owner who uses the app gets to benefit.
To tell you the truth, I’m thrilled – I’ve wanted this for years.
I mean, writing daily emails is fun and useful, but all those articles used to just live on my blog, like so many other blogs.
Now however, I have a way to holistically leverage, deploy, and re-utilise the various elements in my business:
The daily emails, the instructions and checklists I write for clients and partners, the conversations I have and the challenges that surface:
All of it, integrated into one app that teaches as well as trains, so that I can finally deliver my decades of learning and developing and building systems, to anyone who knows how to click a button. How could I not be happy?
So yeah, in short:
I’m excited for the new year – I hope the same goes for you… let’s make it a winner!
