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How to Grow Your Small Business — 11 Steps for Quick and Controlled Growth

Robert Bethel

9 min. read

Updated November 23, 2024

Growing a company is a lot like being a trapeze artist. 

You’re walking a thin line between risk and reward. You must be daring enough to keep the crowd on the edge of their seats but also know when you should hold back to avoid falling.

Unfortunately, unlike an acrobat in the circus, your business doesn’t always have a safety net. And the allures of explosive growth can lead to an unintended and disastrous fall.

So, how do you grow your business and be sure you’re prepared to handle it? By adopting a few simple growth secrets, I’ve refined and harnessed over the last 55 years. 

These are the same tactics and systems that have helped over 77 small business owners like you increase their profits, maintain healthy cash flow, and achieve sustainable growth.

1. Reflect on what’s holding you back from growth

To develop your business growth strategy, you need to know why performance is stagnating or falling. Here are some common reasons:

• •No clear vision for growth
• •Inadequate or outdated market research
• •Operational inefficiencies
• •Financial mismanagement
• •Poor customer relationships
• •Ineffective marketing strategy

Unfortunately, issues and growth opportunities aren’t always obvious. To avoid wasting time, I recommend starting with a thorough financial review. 

Look at your current sales, expenses, and cash flow. Compare results to a previous time to understand how your business has changed.

Maybe sales have declined, certain expenses have increased, or cash flow has slowed. Reviewing your finances should give you ideas for what to do next.

2. Make a 90-day plan

Based on your financial review, create a 90-day plan. Break it down into months and weeks, outlining who will do what, to whom, when, and for how much.

I’m not asking for a Harvard Business School plan, but you need to lay out a base of where the company is today and project what is needed to ramp up growth and profit for the next 30, 60, and 90 days.

Don’t spend a massive amount of time on this plan because you’re not going to be right the first few times. Instead, take the growth planning approach:

• •Create a simple one-page plan
• •Run your business
• •Review performance
• •Revise your plan 

You and your team will improve as you review (every week) and make corrections. In this case, “good enough” is a fine place to start. 

3. Turn on your accounting headlights

Most businesses operate utilizing what I call “taillight accounting (what I briefly covered in step one)” 

Where you take a monthly set of financial statements:

• •Income (profit and loss) statement
• •Balance sheet
• •Cash flow statement

And compare them against your performance last month and last year. 

While a historical monthly review is useful in its own right—taillight accounting tells us where we’ve been, not where we’re going.

Here’s why: It’s typically a few weeks into the next month before you’ve compiled your financial statements for the month before. Forty days have passed since the beginning of the period you are reviewing—not good enough for a business in growth mode.

To be proactive and efficient, you must turn on your “accounting headlights,” where you forecast expectations and compare your actual performance against these forecasts. Now, you are not just looking backward, but looking at current performance compared to what you predicted.

While a monthly review should be your baseline, when pursuing growth you need to look at performance more often. I recommend creating a daily operations board, or a business dashboard, to track your financials easily. These are boards that are updated daily to show where you stand every single day.

With an up-to-date dashboard and “headlight accounting,” you can recognize a problem within 24 hours and make corrections now rather than a month and a half later. 

4. Be transparent with your team

The entire team must know all the information about the business, including the financials. 

I know what you’re thinking: “I can’t do that.” Yes, you can, and it has worked all 77 times I’ve done it.

How can you expect your team to go on a journey with you if they don’t know:

• •Where you’re going
• •How you’re going to get there
• •What you’re going to do 

Start by sharing the simple business plan you created and inviting the right employees to access your performance dashboard. Ideally, you use software with built-in security to avoid this information being shared outside the company.

Then, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, share top-level metrics, milestones, and other useful information with the larger team to ensure everyone is on the same page.

I typically use a series of whiteboards to post the metrics we need to measure daily—I suggest these for any company.

Make sure these boards are placed where the entire company sees them every day. Trust me, these boards make things happen!

5. Reduce all unnecessary expenses

Make sure your team understands there are two routes to increased profitability: increased revenue and decreased cost. You need both.

Start by reviewing your expense budgets and identifying any immediate expenses that could be negotiated or eliminated entirely. If that’s still not enough, turn your team loose to reduce any expense not necessary for your core business. 

When the company leaders point out areas for possible expense reductions and ask for the team’s help, it creates a team spirit that empowers every employee.

6. Require a formal purchase order process for all spending

Growth is scary because it can get out of control in a heartbeat. Therefore, we must know what purchases are being made. 

Using a purchase order process is another way to improve transparency and avoid spending getting out of control. 

Before issuing a P.O., the request must be checked against your cash flow report (pay attention to your cash runway) so you can make sure the funds are available when needed. 

Then, as the owner, decide on the dollar amount threshold at which you want to personally sign off on purchases. Otherwise, set limits and a dedicated process for each department to manage on their own.

7. Explore hypothetical scenarios

No matter how thoroughly you plan and how good you become at forecasting—you will be wrong, and things will change. 

That’s the whole point of this process, to plan, review, and adjust as needed. But it doesn’t have to stop there. If you want to get ahead of potential issues or unforeseen growth, then start creating multiple forecasts.

At a minimum, have a worst-case and best-case scenario to go along with your working forecast. These additional projections can help you avoid making poor decisions and proactively prepare for how you’ll respond if things don’t go to plan.

Tip: Tie these to your actual forecast to make updates based on recent performance quick and easy.

8. Don’t forget customer retention

It is far less expensive to retain a customer than to acquire a new one.

As you make changes to your business and pursue growth, which often means acquiring new customers, don’t lose sight of your current customer base.

Yes, customer churn is part of doing business. That doesn’t mean you should ignore retention efforts. If too many existing customers leave, it can mitigate any gains. 

So, keep an eye on metrics like customer lifetime value and churn to ensure you aren’t losing too many customers. If you can, conduct surveys and 1:1 customer interviews to get first-hand insight about your products and services. 

This will not only help you keep them happy, but it can also uncover ideas on how to attract potential customers.

9. Bonuses, not raises

Don’t jeopardize your company’s future by giving raises. In all our companies, we give either quarterly or annual bonuses, not raises. 

When you give bonuses, you know the amount of profit made and cash is already in the bank.

When you give raises, you increase expenses going into an unknown period. What if revenue drops? 

You may be thinking that the lack of raises will hurt employee morale. 

But, if you keep your team informed, they will not only understand the change but will also be more eager to help the company grow. Their efforts to grow the business will not just help the company, but reward them in the process.

10. No accounts receivables

Try to pass the first window at McDonald’s and see how much food you get at the second window. They don’t do credit, and neither should you.

Think you can’t? Well, I’ve proven you wrong 77 times in 25 different industries. You can do it. 

If you’re carrying high accounts receivable (ARs), you’re in the banking business, pure and simple. If an account doesn’t pay on time, it will crush your cash flow like a bug.

Headlight accounting requires you to know where you are all the time, and having a ton of ARs out in the weeds won’t let that happen. 

Use credit cards or get with a bank and set up a factoring account; yes, they will charge you a fee, but every night, the invoices generated that day will be money in the bank.

11. Eliminate unnecessary risks

Business carries risk and pursuing growth, when not done strategically, can compound this risk. 

So, as you plan and review performance, look for opportunities to eliminate or minimize risks that could derail small business growth.

Luckily, risk elimination is baked into the process I’ve outlined in this article. By:

• •Regularly reviewing and updating your forecasts.
• •Focusing on strengthening your cash flow.
• •Keeping your team informed with top-line metrics.
• •Exploring multiple financial scenarios.
• •Avoiding unnecessary debt.

Your business will be healthier, look less risky to potential investors, and make you more prepared to handle a crisis. All of which removes potential barriers to growth.

What is the most effective way to grow a business?

If you take away one thing, it should be that there is no silver bullet for business growth. 

There’s no secret tactic, no cheat code to improving your bottom line—just a tried-and-true process that leads to orderly, controlled, and long-term growth. 

For over 52 years, the processes I’ve outlined in this article have grown 77 companies across 25 industries, including many that generated in excess of $300 million in annual revenue. 

When I finished writing my book, “Strengthen Your Business,” I sent it to T. Boone Pickens, who I have known for 40 years, and asked him to write the foreword. Here is the last paragraph of his foreword:

“Every country in the world depends on the kind of small and medium-sized businesses Bob aims to help with ‘Strengthen Your Business.’

I would advise any business owner, whether times are troubled or prosperous, to study and apply the lessons Bob demonstrates. Doing so has the power to transform your business into a more efficient and profitable operation.”

I hope you will take these steps and use them to strengthen your business in the same way. 

Robert Bethel

Robert Thomas Bethel is the orchestrator of seventy-seven business turnarounds over the past fifty years. Early successes and troubles in his own professional career inspired his passion for taking over struggling businesses and guiding them towards the road of profitability. Bethel has turned around companies in various industries—from restaurant chains to engineering firms—and has helped save over ten thousand jobs as a result of his strategic business counsel. A graduate of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, Bethel owns several companies across the southern United States and has operated businesses both nationwide and internationally. He is an Eagle Scout and, in addition to counseling, also spends times teaching three-day seminars on best business practices throughout the country. For more information, visit www.robertthomasbethel.com. His new book, "Strengthen Your Business," is available on Amazon.