10 secrets for dramatic business growth in 2019

Whether we like it or not, 2019 is going to be a pretty turbulent year. Brexit coming up, recession looming... No wonder many of us are just battening down the hatches and getting ready to ride out the storm.

But over here at Lionique, we’re feeling cautiously optimistic. We’re predicting that the shift towards a more human business world will continue in 2019. We’re seeing a stronger focus on human interactions. Potential customers and employees are getting more selective and powerful, and businesses are rising to the challenge, embracing new technologies, getting more agile, turning to big data intelligence for smarter marketing decisions, and exploring better ways to innovate.

If you’re in charge of a business and hoping to scale up in 2019, it can feel overwhelming - there are so many moving parts you may feel like you don’t know where to start. Maybe, like many of our clients, you feel like you have the right ideas, but the implementation just isn’t happening. Or maybe you have a clear vision for where your company should be - but feel like you need some help to get there. Possibly, you just need the funds to take you there - but never seem to find the i time to put together a business plan that will appeal to VCs. 

So here are our top 10 tips for how to transform your business from an “almost there” to a roaring success in 2019. 

1. Define Your Brand Values

Brand values aren’t just a “nice to have” anymore. If you want to be a serious contender, you need them to be crystal clear. Absent or outdated brand values are often one of the biggest obstacles in the way of explosive business growth. Brand values may sound like marketing jargon, but it simply means articulating your vision for your business into a few simple words. Choose few that capture:

• what you stand for
• how you want your customers to feel
• what you deliver

If you don’t know what you want, you can be pretty sure that you won’t get there - and you certainly won’t be able to inspire others to help you get there.

2. Create a Brand Profile

Leading on from point 1, use your brand values to create a brand profile. Your brand profile is a specific, real-world plan for converting your brand values into tangible business goals.

Brand values are worthless if nobody knows about them, or understands what they mean for your business. Translating your brand values into a values-based action plan helps you step back from micromanaging, and keeps your business aligned as you grow. You can’t grow fast if you need to be checking what everyone is doing. A to-do list for each of your values sets an example of what that specific word means to your business - meaning that your team will make decisions the way you’d make them yourself. 

3. Update Your Customer Profiles

It may be a new, digital world out there - but the customer is still king. In fact, they’re more in charge than ever before - they dictate your business reality. What’s more, they expect much more of today’s businesses. They expect you to know and understand them, to personalise your marketing to their needs, to offer them relevant content when they need it. If you don’t know your customers, there’s no way you’ll be growing your business in 2019. Get your customer profiles bang up to date, review behavioural data if you have it, look for new patterns. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what new interests they have, or what new pain points are bothering them. Forcing yourself to step back and really rethink your customers’ needs is fundamental to building a growth strategy for next year.

4. Build Customer Values

Once you’ve completed Step 3, connect the new customer needs and pain points you found to specific benefits your product or service offers to each customer group. Then, take things a step further - ensure that you’ve considered all your customer’s pain points, even those that don’t seem relevant to your product at first glance. If you can find ways to help with a broader spectrum of issues, it may give your current offering that critical edge. Check that your points of differentiation still match well to the market’s priorities. Then, make sure that all these customer values shine out of all your communications, presentations and customer services. When things get tough - from a recession, major market shifts, or increasing competition - it’s the personal touch that will get you through. Knowing what to communicate, getting your messages out there, connecting with your prospects on a human level - those are the qualities that sort the businesses that grow in 2019 from the ones that collapse under pressure. 

5. See Your Offering From Outside

It’s not enough to just say what you do anymore. There are a hundred other businesses out there doing it too - and your customers can find them in 5 minutes on Google. Thinking like your customer, knowing their behaviour, what makes them excited or stressed out, means being able to look at your offering from the outside. Be honest with yourself - are you speaking your customers’ language? Is your offer fresh and exciting? Are you offering something new? Don’t innovate for the sake of innovation - keep things up to date out of respect for your customers. Think of it as a marriage - keep the sparks flying and they’ll stay loyal to you. And once you have what it takes to make your customers fall in love with you - and stay that way - that’s when growth really starts to happen for your business.

6. Leave Your Competitors Behind

Keep an eye on the competition, not only in terms of their product offering, but from a branding and communications perspective. To grow, you always need to look and express yourself better than the rest. Your marketing - the way you present your business to the world - must be all about your values and your benefits. Please don’t fall into the trap of making it “pretty” rather than meaningful. Leaving your competition behind means having higher standards in everything you do. It also means being faster than they are - more responsive to market changes, more agile, quicker to pivot where it’s needed, faster to adopt new tech, better business practices, faster to innovate. Think of ways to get lighter on your feet in 2019 - what bad habits, dysfunctional partnerships, and unnecessary overheads have been slowing you down?

7. Bring Back the Competitive Matrix

This is a little controversial, but I love a good competitive matrix. It’s a brilliant tool that allows you to understand your true differentiation. Without a solid matrix, you may well end up falling into a binary approach - as in “theirs is expensive, ours is cheap”. This can be helpful - sometimes reminding yourself of what you aren’t is important too. But don’t forget to explore the bigger picture too. Comparing yourself with your competition on multiple key points might well surprise you if you haven’t done it for a while - but that’s not where the real value lies. Where the matrix begins to offer real business benefit is when you mesh it with your brand values. Use that combination to think of the most important pairs of opposites that emerge from your brand values - then build the contrasts between yourself and your competition at a value-based level. That fresh perspective is a powerful tool for understanding the true differentiation between your business and others, on a higher level. 

8. Check Your Preconceptions - And Your Teams’

In my experience, very few companies ever actually compare the CEO’s vision with everyone else’s perceptions. If you’re struggling to see real growth, and every step forward feels like a battle, it may be that you’re all actually pulling in different directions. Rather than getting frustrated, take the time to sit down and see how well your vision matches up with what others are seeing. Dig deep – don’t just ask your customers, but check in with your management team, your employees, even your suppliers. To see real growth, you need everyone who comes into contact with your brand to share the same view of your business. As a consultancy, our biggest success comes from aligning everyone in a company behind a shared vision. You’d be amazed how fast you can move when you’re all aiming the same way.

9. Bulletproof Your Business Strategy

Strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities - these are all just sides of the same coin. This seems obvious, but when you’re fighting for your business on all fronts it can be hard to keep a positive mindset. Remember to go back to your good old SWOT analysis! When you identify a threat, think of how it can be repositioned as an opportunity. How could Brexit be a good thing for your business? How can a recession be made into a positive? Think of ways to make your weaknesses into your strengths. Push your way out of the SWOT box into original thinking by following each opposite out to its logical conclusion. This process can help you find totally new ideas that will give you a significant competitive edge.

10. Take It From Ideas to Strategy

If you’ve worked your way through steps 1-9, you’ve put yourself in the right position to have a blinding 2019 - but only if you actually translate it into action. Too many business owners hold this process in their heads - meaning that, while they might feel more confident and pat themselves on the back, nothing in their business actually changes! If you’re really committed to seeing growth next year, you need to write it all out in detail. Each step of the process should translate into tangible action steps that are measurable and have a solid deadline. Include the whole team in the writing process - not only will you have more brainpower and fresh perspectives at your disposal, but you’ll also have more people stepping up to take responsibility to make it happen.

Reading articles like this one can be great - hopefully, your ideas start flowing, you feel motivated and inspired. All very nice - but without real, tangible action, nothing will actually happen. It’s not rocket science - if you want a different outcome next year (more growth, less frustration, less busy-work, better results) you have to actually do something different. Starting now.

And here’s a bonus tip for you - the one which actually makes all the difference to your bottom line.

11. Take Action!

Creating the kind of strategic plan that actually works, that combines original ideas with clear steps to implementation, that shows exactly how you’re going to take your business to the next level, isn’t exactly easy. It’s all too tempting to read articles like this, get fired up - and then resign yourself to another year of reacting to the work in front of you, instead of taking decisive action. If you’re really ready to grow in 2019, here’s another little secret for you - one that might just help get you where you want to be.

2019 is going to happen, whether you’re ready or not. So, how do you want to feel on New Year’s Eve 2019? Looking back at another year of half-measures, mediocre results, and hard work with little to show for it? Or will 2019 be the year when you took a few risks, when you decided to change your mindset, when you took your business to the next level? When you found the funding you so desperately needed? When your company actually started to look like the business you always dreamed of building?

At Lionique, we believe that you are more than capable of building a business you’re proud of. If you’d like our help finding new answers to the questions that keep you up at night, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Plan now, execute next year, and don’t forget to let us know how you get on!