Five ways of growing your business in the first year

All great businesses start with a great idea. It starts with passion, excitement and fire in the belly. Mind Ur Bisnis is The Business Caretaker in Bali and Singapore.

Being a small business owner is fun but there needs to be that fire in your belly to want to succeed. The biggest drag on most deadwood businesses is not the lack of knowledge or resources but the lack of direction and determination.Clarity is not about dollars and cents and it’s not about how many clients you have. It’s not about marketing or cash flow or balance sheets. All this stuff comes later.

Clarity is about the DNA of your business. It’s about what drives you and the people around you. It’s the heart and soul of why you go into the office every day and the promise you make to customers. It’s an unshakeable confidence about who you are and why you do what you do for those that you choose to do it for.

So here are my top 5 tips to ensuring your business grows within the first 12 months:

1. The Number 1 Big Goal

Get all the information you need and then make confident and clear decisions with your #1 Big Goal in mind. First decide what your #1 Big Goal is. I suggest starting with a Profit Goal for the year, and then strategising what you need to do to achieve this.

2. Plan B

Be prepared for problems before they arise. Anticipate the choke points in your business. Confirm the worst-case scenarios and have a ‘plan B’ for them.

You can then have focus and discipline because all the strategic thinking has been done.

3. Four 90 Day Plans

Your first year in business is just four 90 day plans. Every 90 days decide what needs to happen to achieve your #1 Big Goal by breaking this down into smaller goals – be clear and confident.

Know where you are now, where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. Break down the tasks into weekly actions and set to work.

4. A Default Diary

Allocate time in your Default Diary to work on the allocated tasks every day or week. A Default Diary is where you block out 50 per cent of your time in the week for doing the tasks you’ve identified as being the best use of your time, those tasks are predominantly in your highest hourly rate categories, your IGAs (Income Growth Activities).

So to achieve that profit goal the best use of your time may be in sales, so this activity will appear often in your Default Diary.Remember sales is the only activity that actually puts money into your business. Everything else takes it out.

5. Ask Questions

Always ask the following three questions:

1. What's working?

2. What's not working?

3. What are we doing about it?

To be certain you are concentrating on the right strategy you need to test and measure daily, weekly and monthly. Business is a fast changing environment, and business owners need to be flexible and adaptable.

Of course, every business is reliant on sales and one of the most important concepts to embrace is delivering product or service to the chosen target market.

When you decide to go into business you need to be absolutely clear about who will buy your product and why. You need to be able to identify them with great clarity.

The skills and tools required to create an idea are very different to the skills and tools required to grow market share. When there’s clarity, confidence follows. And so does a second year and beyond in business!

Stefan Kazakis is a business strategist, sought-after presenter and speaker and author of the new book, From Deadwood to Diamonds (Major Street Publishing, $29.95). For more information please visit Stefan Kazakis or email him.. Mind Ur Bisnis your business caretaker "Taking Care of Business" in Asia.