How To Grow Your Business To 6, 7 and Even 8 Figures (#1 strategy)

If you are an entrepreneur and you want to know how to grow your business to 6, 7 even 8 figures in the shortest time possible, then in this post I want to share with you one of my top strategies to successfully scale any business fast, and predictability increase your profit margins.

Now, if this is the first time you’re reading on of my articles my name is Chris Guerriero and I’ve built four 8-figure businesses, successfully sold several businesses, and I also invest in growing companies – and all that gives me a unique insight into strategies that grow businesses every time they’re used – not matter what size your company is today, or what industry you’re in, or what the economy is.

And I want to detail one of the best strategies we’ve used to scale companies fast – and it costs far less and takes far less time than most of the old tactics you read about in books.

Now one of the simplest ways to scale any company is using a process called Lateral Expansion. It’s not easy, but it’s simple – meaning that if you follow a proven system like what I’ll show you here – you will get results.?

And when we’re talking about Lateral Expansion – those results could collapse time frames and help you scale more in one quarter than most companies scale in a decade.

Tell me in the comments if you’ve ever heard of lateral expansion – because most entrepreneurs have never heard of it, and the ones I meet who say they have, most of the time they get it wrong.

And I think the easiest way to define lateral expansion is to start by defining vertical expansion.

Because they’re two totally different ways to grow a company.

Vertical expansion is the basic price of entry in business, and it’s what almost every business focuses on when they want to grow – they focus on increasing?prospects, and increasing?sales, and increasing?LTV?of customers.

And all those things are vital pieces of scaling a company, but they all cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to test.

Lateral expansion, on the other hand, is thinking outside the box and using tools that most businesses either don’t know about, or don’t believe are possible, or just plain forget to use.

It’s kind of like vertical expansion is the firewood you need to keep throwing on a fire repeatedly to keep it lit meaning, you must always keep marketing for new customers to stay alive in business, and lateral expansion is like throwing gas on your fire and experiencing dramatic growth in a shorter period of time.

Like scaling from 1MM to 2MM and 2MM to 10MM and 10MM to 30MM. And if you do it right, and back that growth up with systems, then that new level of revenue is your new low revenue number.

So, to scale at the rate needed in today’s world and to maximize profits, we need to use both Vertical and Lateral Expansion.

And there’s several ways we’ve used Lateral Expansion to scale companies in my portfolio over the years. The 3 most common for us are:

1.?????Acquisitions – and if you want to know?how to grow your business using acquisitions -?we shot a video not too long ago showing you step-by-step how we acquire companies and exactly how to handle the negotiations to acquire those companies for FAR LESS up-front cost. If you haven’t seen that video, just do a search for my “acquisition video” on my YouTube channel.

2.?????The second form of Lateral Expansion is building a complimentary company that grows your current company. Basically, we segmented a department out of a company, making it its own entity and leveraging both companies to scale each other. So, in the end instead of having one profitable, successful company after 12-18 months you have 2 even more profitable, successful companies because they both support the growth of the other.

3.?????The third most common form of Lateral Expansion we use is adding a branding asset that massively increases our “reach". So instead of reaching thousands of people a day with our message, we might reach millions a day for a week or a month or even a whole a quarter.

And that’s what I want to focus on today, and I think the fastest way for you to clearly understand how to do this in your company is if I walk you through a real-life example of one of the times we’ve done this:

So, what I’m going to share is how and why we used NASCAR to grow our company for free.

I absolutely understand that you might not think you’re able to leverage NASCAR, but I have never been in an industry where there weren’t gigantic, unbelievably big opportunities that people were just passing by because they weren’t thinking outside the box.

So, keep your mind open and my guess is that in a few minutes you’ll think of at least one way to leverage this concept to scale your company this quarter.?

Several years ago, I was a partner in a social community called Health Life, and one of our main products was a paid online community, and I remember sitting in a meeting with our leadership team and looking at the company targets and brainstorming on ways to hit those targets. One of which was a target of having 20,000 new members in our paid community, and we had very little in the budget to make that happen.

But every person at that meeting knew that if we reached that target it would mean several hundred thousand dollars in new revenue for the company every month, but since we had hardly any money budgeted, we had to get creative.

So, we spent a day listing any assets we could leverage to get the company that kind of growth, and I remember asking the analytics team to send me the results of the latest survey we did with our current members, because before I throw any time or money at any marketing tactic I want to know as much as I can about my current target audience.

And that survey showed us 3 main things:

1.?????41% of our current members were engaged in some form of personal development

2.?????56% were single

3.?????32% liked NASCAR which I just kind of pushed aside because let’s be honest - NASCAR fans were not our target demographic for a health community.

But after several hours, one of our leadership team said “A few years ago, before you became a partner in the company, we created a partnership with a NASCAR team. Do you think we can use that?”

And I sat there thinking “why the heck is this the first time this is coming up?”

Long story short, the way they described it to me, was that we owned a lot of aspects surrounding this deal, including a technology for wrapping the car so the entire car was wrapped in one big sticker that included all the sponsor logos.

And we could change the wrapper to include anything we wanted including putting our company logo on the car during a race.

Now the good news was that NASCAR fans are historically super loyal buyers to companies that sponsor cars – but the problem like I said before was that our target audience was not NASCAR fans.?

Yes – some of our current members said they “liked” NASCAR but that didn’t mean other NASCAR fans would buy a membership into a health community like ours.

NASCAR fans buy things like beer, and tires and motor oil and things related to cars.?

Now, there’s a few outliers who have been successful sponsoring cars that don’t fit that model, but we didn’t have the budget to run our car for a year before we gained brand exposure and began to profit, so I put together everything I knew about our target audience.

And that’s the first step in Lateral Expansion – know your current best audience and find new ways put your message in front of much larger numbers of them.

Here’s what I knew that I could leverage:

41% of our current members liked personal development, and I happen to be friends with several of the largest personal development icons around.

I could leverage that.

56% of our current members were single, and I also happen to have a friend who owned one of the largest singles websites at the time.

I could leverage that too.

So, I put a list together of 8 large brands that I had a strong relationship with, either they were good friends of mine or they were clients inside of my advisory firm. Either way, they had a strong level of confidence in me because they’ve seen me consistently grow companies by thinking outside the box.

And although I knew NASCAR fans were not my target audience, and I probably wouldn’t get 20,000 new members into our community just by putting our logo on our car during one race.

I also knew that if I could get some of those personal development friends of mine to mail their massive database and promote our community, I could easily reach that goal.

So, I went to all 8 of them and told them I wanted them to send 3 emails to their list, using naked links meaning they would not get a kick-back for anyone who joined our community. They were just promoting our community as a favor to me.

And they all just looked at me like I was crazy because that’s a big ask.

Because from that day forward they would be the only person in almost any room they ever walked into who could say their photo was on a NASCAR.

That’s cool bragging rights and something they could never have achieved without me.

7 of those 8 people said YES!

Now, if you don’t know anything about NASCAR, the Dayton track can hold almost 170k people, plus that year about 17MM people watched the race on TV, and out of all those I doubt we sold more than a dozen memberships to our community, because NASCAR fans were not our target audience!

BUT…

With seven large databases mailing for us and millions of emails promoting us, do you think we hit our target?

And by the way, we also built a large database from that promotion. A database that we were able to advertise all our other product to, and products that we didn’t own but that we received a commission for referring a sale to.

So we used an asset that we already had access to, and we created a win win for some key relationship in my life, with no money out of pocket. We exceeded our expectations by adding a branding asset (the NASCAR) that massively increased our “reach” and put our message in front of a far larger audience that didn’t know us before.?Not NASCAR fans, but rather all the loyal followers of our personal development friends who promoted us.

Like I mentioned earlier, I have never been in an industry where there weren’t GIGANTIC, unbelievably big opportunities that people were just passing by.

It might be your receptionist’s, sister’s college roommate who’s now a celebrity who might endorse your product, or one of your kids’ best friends who has a big YouTube following who would love an extra few bucks to mention your product online.

Lateral Expansion begins with thinking outside the box and opening your mind to the possibilities that are right around you.

Remember, I had no clue we had access to a NASCAR until I dug deep during a team meeting.

And we’ve done this kind of out of the box marketing, this Lateral Expansion, many times in every industry I’ve been in. And done right, it’s always like throwing gas on the fire and accelerating our growth.

So, think about how to grow YOUR business. What’s one big opportunity, or asset, or relationship you can leverage to put your message in front of a massive audience.?

Get creative and share your ideas with me below or on YouTube where I explain this concept in hyper-detail.

And after you watch that video, look at what others are sharing, and help them think bigger by adding to their ideas. And be open when someone else adds to your ideas in the comments too, because the more people you brainstorm with, the bigger your idea will get, and we have a great community on YouTube! Someone in the comments might introduce you to a big name who might endorse your product.

We also have big movers and shakers who read these articles, some amazingly big CEO’s, pro-athletes, actors, and most of them understand that they grow by helping others.

So, share your idea and then take a minute to comment on someone else’s idea.

Share your insight on how you too can leverage Lateral Expansion to grow your company by leaving a comment below.