Want to grow your business by 20% or more?
Do you feel like your business isn’t growing fast enough?
Do you feel like everybody else is doing great and you aren’t?
Do you feel like you are trying your hardest but you are never going to reach the numbers expected?
I meet lots of business owners who feel like this and it’s not good - it makes you feel like a total failure.
Want to know the reality of what’s actually happening with businesses in the UK and what counts as ‘good’ growth?
Every year a report is written by the ‘Scale Up Institute’ called ‘The Scale Up Report’ which gives facts and figures about scale up businesses in the UK. The latest report was published in November 2021 from 2019 data.
First things first - What is a scale up Business?
A scale up business is a business which:
Is growing by more than 20% per annum by turnover growth
Is growing by more than 20% per annum by employee growth
Is growing by more than 20% per annum in both employees and turnover
Doesn’t sound too ambitious, does it?
Now for the sobering facts……
There are 5.7m SME (small to medium enterprise) businesses in the UK
In 2019, of those 5.7m only 33,445 businesses met one of the above criteria to call themselves a ‘Scale Up’ business.
That’s less than 7 in a 1000!!!
Not a lot is it?
If you have met one of the above criteria, you are classed as a scale up business - big congratulations. You deserve it, being a business owner is hard, growing your business is harder!
This means that if your business grows by 20% year on year, it will double every 4 years or nearly triple in 6 years.
As shown in this example, where turnover starts at £10,000
Year Growth Turnover (£)
Zero Zero 10,000
1 20% 12,000
2 20% 14400
3 20% 17280
4 20% 20736
5 20% 24883
6 20% 29860
The hard reality…
So how come if you look at all the marketing and social media out there, everybody talks about huge growth rates, making 6 figure numbers etc. etc.
Ask yourself ‘In the real world, how realistic are these claims?’ When we know that a growth rate of 20% is only possible for less than 7 businesses in a thousand.
Now we understand the reality of the situation wouldn’t we all want a 20% growth on our business year on year?
The question is what can we realistically and practically do to achieve this?
DESIRE
Daniel Priestley, co-founder and CEO of Dent Global Ltd and author of books such as ‘Key Person of Influence’ and ‘Oversubscribed’, meets 100’s of business owners each week and the thing they all have in common is DESIRE.
They all have a desire to do well, to grow their businesses, to be the best they can be. But if they ALL have this desire, it can’t be enough. Because less than 7 out of 1000 businesses owners who have the desire to grow, will have a greater than 20% annual growth!
So there has to be something more that businesses who are achieving 20% growth are doing.
What is it and more importantly what can we do to join them?????
How to scale up your Business?
Here are Daniel’s top 3 recommendations to scale up your business….
1. Luck
Yes we all need a certain amount of luck. We need to be in the right place, at the right time and have the right ideas. All successful entrepreneurs will have had an element of luck.
But we can help get luck on our side - put yourself in the right place, for luck to happen. Get out and meet people. Have a positive attitude and you never know what might happen.
A few years ago I wrote a blog about needing luck in business, here it is: Do you need some luck?
2. Look at how you spend your time
There will be certain things in your business that only you can do and other things that other people could do. Such as admin, book keeping, social media, updating your website…..etc.
You can make more money doing only the things you can do, then outsource the rest. Simples!!
Outsourcing will free you up to do more of the things only you can do e.g. business strategy, pitching for work, signing off on branding etc.
This is also where you will make the most impact on the success of your business.
What tends to happen is that the things you outsource are the things you don’t really like doing - win, win! Leaving you more time to do the things only you can do, these tend to be the things your love about your business.
An extreme example of this is a brain surgeon. If a brain surgeon can do 4 operations a day, why would they only do 2 operations a day and spend the rest of the day doing admin, book keeping, sorting out taxes etc.!!!
3. Design to Succeed
This is Daniel’s most important recommendation to scale up your business. Spend time designing your business to succeed and it will pay off. All successful businesses are designed to succeed.
What does this mean? Think of an aeroplane, it is a hunk of metal, so is a car, so is a motorbike. But the aeroplane flies, the others don’t. Why is this? Because its been designed to fly - it’s been designed to succeed at flying!
So design all the elements of your business to succeed:
Design your products/services to succeed
Design your systems/processes to succeed
Design your marketing to succeed
Design your branding & culture to succeed
Remember if you are growing your business by 20% per annum, this is fantastic, you have come in the top 7 out of 1000 businesses.
Your business growth is fast enough!
You are doing great!
You are reaching the numbers expected!
You are in the real world and it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing!
For more information on the ‘Scale Up Report’, visit the Scale Up Institute at: https://www.scaleupinstitute.org.uk
When I work with small business owners 1 to 1 as their Business Mentor they always become a scale up business! Want your business to be a scale up business? Then contact Karen for a free business chat to start everything off.
