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3 Quick Growth Strategies

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Hey entrepreneurs,

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Welcome to the Better Business Brief, where I share takeaways from:

• running a business I’m building to sell for millions
• my consulting with business owners building to sell for millions
• tips and tricks you can use to do the same

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Having worked with a LOT of different types of businesses in a very short amount of time, I have come across 3 key types of major growth strategies that work for businesses that have scaled fast.

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The first thing I’ll say is that as we move through these 3, it’s important to think about why you want to grow as a business. What is important to you during the course of that growth? What might help the growth go well? Etc. The 3 major types we’ll look at today can be broken down into 2 subcategories: Growing internally and growing externally…

The first way to grow internally is through franchising.

Franchising in its simplest terms means that you break off little sub-businesses within your overall business for the purpose of letting someone else run them in different areas, regions, or markets. The most well known example is probably McDonald’s. Each one is exactly the same, and there’s a reason. Something becomes a franchise when it follows 3 key things: The owner of each individual franchise is required to use the same standard operating procedures as the rest of the franchises, the same trademark/intellectual property, and to pay a franchise fee to run the franchise. The pros are that as the business owner, you control basically every aspect of the business as it grows this way. The con is that there is a whole regulating body for franchises and you must comply with the rules of it and get through all types of red tape to do so.

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The second way of growing internally of course is licensing.

Licensing is basically franchising without doing all 3 of the franchising things. So for example, someone could license your business if they have to use the same procedures and same brand name and trademark, but don’t have to pay a franchise fee, or any other combination of 2 of those things or even just one of those things. An example would be if a painting company allowed someone to come on and run their own business within their business, and they had to use all of the same exact procedures, plans, marketing, and also had to use the same brand name, but they did not have to pay a fee to do so, and instead just owed an ongoing revenue share to the “home office”. The pro here is that you get most of the same control or benefits of franchising without the regulation. The con of course is that you have to give up at least one of the three things.

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The third way of growing is by looking externally and making acquisitions of other businesses that support your growth.

This could be a business just like yours in a different area. It could be a business that allows you to make more money somehow. It could be a business that saves you money somehow. Any business that by having ownership helps you grow. The big pro of this is that by buying an established business, you buy all of the mistakes they made and money they wasted figuring it out, and you get an established team and customer base in the process. You probably also buy some new tech, tactics, and strategies. The con however really comes down to the unknown. There is a lot of risk in doing this, because there could be skeletons in the closet that you don’t know about. The best example I can give you of doing this that comes to mind is Amazon. They literally buy companies all the time and it has worked really really well for them.

Picking which strategy is right for you really comes down to the level of control you feel like you need to grow the business and your level of risk tolerance. If you have your business so standardized that you could teach a third grader to run it in a matter of weeks, and its success depends mainly on doing all of those things the same way every time, you might as well go with franchising or licensing. They allow you to dictate the way things grow a lot more. If you have a little appetite for risk, and want to grow fast, growth through acquisitions is probably the actual fastest way to grow, and if you can do it in a cost-effective way while maintaining the things that allowed you success in the first place, you can often do really well.

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There’s a lot more than this to learn about these types of growth, but these are the key things I’ve found can really help you decide which one is right for you. I hope this has been helpful for you in your journey. If reading this sparked ideas about a play you think you can make in your business, or if you still have questions about which one is right for you, I’d love to talk about it: Grab some time here and we can talk about how I might be able to help.

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Be great. Keeping growing and aspiring. And as always: I hope you got something from this.

If you did, share it with a friend who may too, as this is the best way for me to grow it and make this better.

They can even sign up here :)

Happy value-building to all of you!

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See you next time for Better Business Brief,

-Brody