Specialize, Simplify and Systematize to Grow Your Business and Income the Easy Way

I was teaching a marketing class recently to a group of coaches and consultants and said to the participants that you need to do just three things to grow your business: specialize, simplify and systematize. Here are my tips on these three steps that you can implement right away in your business to increase your profits while working fewer hours. Step 1: Specialize People look for the best in a field when they need advice and solutions. If you strive to be the best you can be in your area of specialty, so you’ll stand out as the top service provider in your marketplace. Get clear on what your greatest passions, strengths and expertise are, and build your business around that. Know what makes you different from your competitors and leverage that uniqueness. Developing a specialty based on both your expertise and unique personality will give you a very distinctive professional brand. Offer unique solutions to solve the problems and frustrations of a smaller section of your target audience so that you will be seen as a specialist and not a generalist. Go deep instead of broad. You’ll be easily referable and you’ll be able to charge much higher fees. To build a highly successful, highly profitable business, you must be an expert at what you do. You need to choose one market, focus on it, and grow it as big as you can. Step 2: Simplify Too many women are overwhelmed with all the actions they are taking to grow their business. They are making it much more complicated than it needs to be because they aren’t following a simple model. You need to simplify and streamline your business so you can work fewer hours, have more freedom, and make more money. My motto is simplicity plus prosperity – I want them both. Focus on those activities that will produce profit to grow your business and income. The most important activities in your business are marketing, sales, client service delivery, and new product and service development. Simplify your actions so that you’re devoting most of your time to attracting new business and delivering your specialized services, and delegate the rest. Step 3: Systematize When you’re just starting out and you have only a few clients, running your business is easy. Once you reach expert status though and have a full slate of clients, live events, information products and joint ventures, you get too busy to handle it all. This is when you need to automate and systematize many of your business functions so that you are able to focus on your core strength. Lead generation, follow-up, product delivery, payment and registration can be entirely automated, freeing you up to do more high level work. You can develop simple systems for everything in your business – email, client support, publishing ezines, articles and blog posts, posting to social media sites, managing your schedule, and processing payments to name a few. Creating systems and automating will help you simplify and streamline your business so you can work fewer hours and make more money. Systematizing your business will give you much more income, freedom and fulfillment. Take action on any one of these ideas on specializing, simplifying and systematizing and I can guarantee that your income and feeling of fulfillment in your business will increase dramatically.