You will find a copy of the session recording below. After this you have the options of taking a quick assessment to help reinforce the key elements of the session.
Learning Points
“How to Grow Your Business,” offers a comprehensive look at the fundamental concepts and strategies for business growth. Here are the key learning points from the presentation:
- Defining Success: It starts with understanding that every business is unique and has different goals. Business owners need to be clear about what success looks like for their business and personal lives.
- 12 Steps to Business Growth and Exit Readiness: The programme outlines a 12-step agenda that covers various aspects of business growth, including growth drivers, cash strategies, improving cash flow, margin/cost control, and preparing for business exit.
- Strategic Planning Based on Goals: Referencing a conversation from “Alice in Wonderland,” the programme emphasizes the importance of having a clear direction and plan for your business, tailored to your specific goals and visions.
- Identifying Dangers, Opportunities, and Strengths: Business owners are encouraged to identify potential dangers, exploit opportunities, and build on their key strengths to realize their vision.
- Understanding Business Survival Rates: Statistics from the ONS are presented to highlight the challenges businesses face in surviving beyond five years, underscoring the need for strategic planning.
- Performance Improvements through Incremental Gains: The programme draws inspiration from the British Cycling team’s success story, which was achieved by making small, incremental improvements for overall performance enhancement.
- Lead vs. Lag Indicators: It differentiates between lead indicators (activities needed to achieve goals) and lag indicators (results that occur after the fact), advocating for a focus on lead indicators for effective management.
- Key Profit Drivers: The programme identifies several profit drivers like frequency, margin, overheads, acquisition, and retention that are fundamental to all businesses, urging participants to focus on these elements.
- Understanding Financial Statements: Using a fictional company, ‘Alex’s Software Company’, the programme illustrates how to analyze and interpret Profit and Loss statements for business insights.
- Increasing Transaction Value: Strategies such as upselling, bundling, and conducting gap analyses are discussed as ways to increase the average transaction value.
- Improving Purchase Frequency: The importance of customer communication and engagement to increase purchase frequency is highlighted with practical examples.
- Margin Optimisation: Strategies for improving gross margins, such as focusing on high-margin add-ons and understanding the impact of discounting, are discussed.
- New Customer Acquisition: Emphasises the importance of tracking leads, conversion rates, and understanding the lifetime value of customers for effective customer acquisition strategies.
- Customer Retention and Attrition: The programme stresses the significance of tracking customer attrition rates and having effective feedback and engagement strategies to retain customers.
- Cash Flow Management: It discusses the importance of managing creditors, stock/work in progress, and debtors, and how these affect the cash flow of a business.
- Debtor Days and Credit Control: The programme covers the management of debtor days and the importance of having a robust credit control process to ensure timely payments from customers.
In summary, Week 1 of the FiMBO programme provides a foundational understanding of the various aspects of business growth, emphasizing strategic planning, performance improvement, financial management, and customer relationship strategies.