Adam Toporek Twitter // customersthatstick.com

~ Customer service keynote speaker and workshop wizard, frequent #podcast guest (and host), and author of Be Your Customer’s Hero

One of the best ways for entrepreneurs to scale is to leverage the incredible technological and remote labor opportunities available today.

Many of the barriers to growth that early-stage businesses faced in the past have been eliminated or diminished by our interconnected world.

Where entrepreneurs might have previously struggled with finding the right talent locally or having to add a salary they could not afford, now they can find specialized independent contractors across the globe whose services can scale with the business.

Where previously implementing a CRM system would have required a major leap of faith and capital investment, now service as a software offerings are ubiquitous and systems, from basic to robust, can be had for an affordable monthly subscription.

Need a new logo? A virtual assistant? Sales page content?

Freelance and crowdsourcing platforms enable you to get competitive bids and even spec work from a global marketplace of providers.

And while these methods do have their downsides – an excess of inferior vendors to sift through and the challenges of remote management to name a couple – those issues tend to pale in comparison to the risks of more traditional alternatives. In any industry that is not capital intensive, an amazing world of opportunity awaits growing entrepreneurs who can now compete effectively against big business and scale smartly with minimal risk.

Ana Hoffman Twitter // www.trafficgenerationcafe.com

~ I plan on blogging forever. So far, so good. In need of sleep, sanity, and a hug. Your way to more traffic http://tgcafe.it/TrafficHacksTw

Website push notifications are an incredibly easy and effective way to tap your visitors on the shoulder.

The visibility of push notifications is very high (as high as 90%!), and they work across a number of platforms, devices, and browsers.

Your visitors simply subscribe once through a web push request, then receive notifications from your website on both desktop and mobile devices.

One of the reasons web push notifications work so well at the moment is the fact that this engagement strategy is still in its infancy.

You can make sure it continues to work well for you if you keep your push notifications personalized, contextual, timely, and relevant.

This is one of the cases where less is more – fewer notifications will actually have more impact.

Andreea Ayers Twitter // www.launchgrowjoy.com

~ Sharing tips & advice for product entrepreneurs, Etsy sellers and ecommerce store owners at
http://www.launchgrowjoy.com #ecommerce

My best tip for scaling and growing your business is to hire people to help you before you actually think you need them!

Start with one person and delegate the tasks that are your least favorite to do, as well as the tasks that don’t directly contribute to sales/revenue.

That will free up some time for you to plan and implement other strategies that are directly tied to revenue.

Andy Beal Twitter // andybeal.com

~ author of Repped: 30 Days to a Better Online Reputation. ]Speaker, author & CEO of @RepRefinery. P/T travel photographer & serve on the @RaleighRescue BOD

Understand that your reputation is one of the most crucial investments you can make in your business.

Of course, that means creating a professional looking logo, designing a user-friendly website, and not cutting corners on any printed material, but it goes way beyond that.

Your reputation is an extension of your character.

The investment you make into your employees welfare, how you treat your customers, and the interactions you have with your peers, will all determine how your company’s brand is perceived.

A strong reputation provides a solid platform for referrals and word-of-mouth growth. Build a strong reputation and you won’t have to spend as much on PR, advertising, or social media.

Arnie Kuenn Twitter // VerticalMeasures.com

~ CEO of Vertical Measures a PPC, SEO & Content Marketing agency. International speaker. Co-author of Content Marketing Works. Hiking, travel & most sports.

I have said for more than two decades as an entrepreneur, that the top line fixes [almost] everything. What do I mean by this?

It means that your focus must always be on revenue. It does not matter if you are a well-funded startup or if you are a business that is in “boot strap” mode, eventually you must be profitable. And the ONLY way to be profitable it to bring in more than you have in expenses.

I have seen companies that truly believe “if you build it they will come.” They think they have the best product since sliced bread and people will just line up to buy it. Or they think they need to hire this and hire that, get ready for the stampede of customers.

Twelve months later they are out of business. You must make sales and marketing your number one priority. If revenue is coming in, you can address almost any business issue the company might have, whether it be personnel, processes, receivables, facilities, or whatever.

Bryan Eisenberg Twitter // bryaneisenberg.com

~ Keynote speaker, best selling author – http://www.buyerlegends.com. Dad of 3. Youth #baseball coach. Publisher http://www.playballkid.com.

Plan A Customer Journey That Is Channel Agnostic

Charlatans are endemic to all forms of marketing but they are especially attracted to digital. I’d like them to go away but there is always somebody willing to buy what they are selling.

ALL business is becoming digital!

Connected customers engage in many ways (foreseen and unforeseen) with brands in and out of stores, offices, call centers, social media, catalogs and websites.

Those customers don’t care what channel they interact with or what department gets the credit. Customers think of every interaction with a brand as THE brand experience.

Then they happily share the best and worst of those experiences. Wonder why customer experience isn’t what most CEOs focus on for differentiation?

Customer satisfaction and customer experience appear not to have budged at all.

According to Bain & Company, 80% of surveyed companies claimed to be delivering a superior customer experience, but only 8% of those companies had customers that agreed with them. What a dangerous blind spot!

That leaves an awful lot of companies actively disappointing customers while smugly congratulating themselves on their “superior customer experience.” Couldn’t be you, right?

Most companies don’t have a map. They haven’t mapped out the customer journey, either in terms of what it is now, or what it ideally ought to be. And without that map, they can’t plot the data to determine what’s actually happening — or what they ought to do about it.

Jeff Bezos said it best “If you’re customer-focused, you’re always waking up wondering, how can we make that customer say, wow?

We want to impress our customers — we want them to say, wow. That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.”

Why do so few companies bother to plan and then validate the buyer journey with accountable metrics?

Is it inertia?

“We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work” – Thomas A. Edison

Or perhaps it is…

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”  – Andy Grove

There is some hard work on your business involved. There is the careful navigation of people’s territories, channels and silos, There is the inherent career risk that comes with greater accountability.

There is also a great opportunity. Plan a great experience, deliver a great experience and then improve on it. That is a challenge all businesses face. Some will live up to that challenge and most won’t.

Chad Pollitt Twitter // chadpollitt.com

~ Faculty Indy @KelleySchool, Adjunct @RutgersU, Top 20 CMO Influencer, @HuffingtonPost & @Guardian contributor, Co-founder @Relevance & former @USArmy Commander

People, process, product (service) – This is at the core of growing and scaling a business.

That said, it’s also critical to make sure there are no holes in the marketing and sales funnel. It’s quite common for businesses to ignore the top of their funnel online. And others don’t do inside sales. This can stifle growth.

Christy Wright Twitter // businessboutique.com

~ Author, Business Coach & Intense Friend. I love Jesus, my patient family, running & cookies. Enthusiasm is my love language. Business Boutique book out 4/18/17!

Business growth can be an exciting, wild ride – but only if you are prepared to grow in the right way. In fact, trying to grow too big, too fast is one of the number one reasons that small businesses fail, second only to a basic lack of money.

The business implodes because it can’t support the growth.

Before you take the step to expand your business, you must build up your revenues. If you don’t have the finances to grow, then you simply aren’t ready to take that next step yet.

You want to build your revenues up high enough so that it doesn’t feel like a terrifying leap when your business begins to expand.

This may mean slowing down and recognizing that, while you want to grow your business and feel like you are ready, the numbers might not add up.

You have to have patience and wait until the money is available.

Colin Wright Twitter // colin.io

~ Author, speaker, podcaster. Books http://colin.io / Blog http://exilelifestyle.com / Host http://letsknowthings.com & http://considerthis.io / I travel

Growth requires persistence and time, but it also necessitates that you’re communicating something valuable from the beginning.

That means it’s not enough to simply post things on Twitter or maintain a consistent schedule of inspirational quotes on Facebook — you need to stand out and give people who might be interested in following you and engaging with your project something they care about.

Ideally, this means you step back, take a good long look at who you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, and allow that to inform what you produce and share.

Allow yourself to not just ‘produce content,’ but to tell a story across all the different touchpoints you have with your audience and potential audience.

This results in a unique consistency, but also helps you stand out from everyone else who’s doing something similar.

No one can be a better you than you, and telling your story in this way incentivizes folks to stick around and share your work with others who might enjoy it.

Scale naturally occurs as a result, so long as you do well by the people who are paying attention.

Darren Stehle Twitter // eatmovebe.com

~ Coaching people to flex their mind and nourishing their wellbeing. #Nutrtion and #Fitness #Coach

To build and grow a successful business you need to know your authentic self, how you do your best work, and whether you offer a service, product or both.

There are more channels and options to promote what you do online than can be counted. There are just as many products and services you can buy to learn how to be a better “marketer”. 

However, there’s an old school method that has worked for thousands of years and still does to this day.

Invite someone to a conversation and offer them as much value as if they were already my client. 

Recently, I turned my back on SEO and social media promotions. I’m not ignoring it forever, but I’m not focussing on it for now. Instead, I’ve made the choice to focus on one person at a time.

I want to transform people’s health by helping them flex their mind and nourish their wellbeing.

Is that a scaleable form of business? That depends on the value I offer and how much I can charge.

That depends on what I want my business to look like so I’m happy and not overwhelmed. That depends on if I stay true to myself and offer deeply transformative and fearless nutrition and lifestyle coaching to one person at a time.

When I do that I don’t need to worry about scalability.

David Risley Twitter // blogmarketingacademy.com

~ ProBlogger, Internet Entrepreneur. I Show Bloggers How To Generate A Full Time Income Online and Turn Their Passion Into a Solid, Profitable Business.

Know your numbers. I spent a long time in my business shooting from the hip and going on my gut.

Finally I realized just how important it is to establish some KPIs (key performance indicators) and to make a regular habit of measuring and tracking them.

Unless you have some hard metrics to go by, it is hard to really scale your business because you’ll be flying by the seat of your pants.

Erik Luhrs Twitter // guruselling.com

~ The Bruce Lee of Lead Generation. Creator of Subconscious Lead Generation.

My best advice for scaling a business is to engage in Simplified-Exponential thinking.

This handles the 2 main issues that stop companies from growing; Offering more stuff that is too complex, and being self-limited.

When companies start adding more products or services, they tend to “over-build” them so they are too complex to be easily understood.

Example: At first, your company just sold a software that helped track staff work hours. It was successful. Then you decide to add an outsourced service to find, hire, train and track employees so that they are super efficient, super productive, fully certified…..

From very simple to too complex overnight.

At the same time, companies can often pigeon-hold themselves, meaning that they lock themselves into one piece of one niche industry.

Example: You sell a software to track staff work hours. You think you have to remain stuck in ‘staff time tracking,’ so you create an add-on for multi-devise tracking.

You make some sales, but not nearly as much as your original software. So you build another add-on, and another, scrapping less and less sales each time.

But if you allowed yourself to think exponentially, you would say that staff work tracking lends itself to productivity, efficiency, business growth, revenue per hour, tactical planning…etc.

It is a fine line that must be walked between staying simple to understand and expanding in a way that is useful to more and more customers.

Guy Kawasaki Twitter // guykawasaki.com

~ Mantra: I empower people. Chief evangelist of @Canva https://www.canva.com/ . Author of thirteen books. Former chief evangelist of Apple.

Most companies scale too fast because of delusions of immediate, “hockey-stick” acceptance.

I’ve never seen a company die because it couldn’t scale fast enough. I’ve seen many die because they scaled too early.

Remember: eat what you kill, not what you intend to kill. And if your product does take off, you’ll figure out a way to scale.

Jan Orsula Twitter // weekhack.com

~ Enthusiastic Digital Marketer, Skilled in #SocialMedia, #Blogging, List Building. Ice Hockey Fan & Amateur #GuitarPlayer

My best tip for growing an (online) business is to focus on one thing at a time. Focus on building a quality and engaging email list. There’s a bunch of shiny objects we’ve seen every day that causes only distraction.

A ton of different marketing strategies, sales techniques, business opportunities, social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

In today’s world, we have so many choices that is very difficult to find the right ones most appropriate for our business.

Most people overlook the importance of building an email list. If you ask successful online entrepreneurs what would they changed if they could, nine out of ten say start collecting email addresses from my potential customers from day one.

Email is most proper and responsive channel to connect with your potential customers.

Through email, you can engage, educate, and build a connection with your subscribers on a personal level.

It’s much easier to sell a product to people who know you, trust you, have a positive experience with you than someone who barely remembers your name.

First, I’d create some kind of free material like checklist, spreadsheet, video series or ebook. And offer it in exchange for an email address.

After someone opts in, I’d send them ‘thank you email’ where I’d introduce myself, tell them what I’m going to send in the future, add some personal note and the most important thing – I’d ask what is their biggest problem with the topic.

You’ll find out that a lot of people will respond. Most of them have very similar questions. Just take the time, create a valuable response and then just use it again and again.

Jim Berkowitz Twitter // launchhawk.com

~ Founder of LaunchHawk | Startup Mentoring | Growth Consulting | Digital Marketing | CRM Technology Coaching | ‘The Professor’| Jazz DJ on KOTO-fm | Telluride CO

If you want to be able to grow and scale your business, marketing technology must used so that the lead generation process can be completely automated.

First you’ll need to outline your marketing process in detail, then find products that can work together to accomplish all the process steps.

For example, If your going to use Facebook Ads to promote a Webinar, you’ll want the leads generated from Facebook to automatically go into your autoresponder and your Webinar software to generate a series of automatic emails about the webinar (and after the webinar to take the next step).

If that next step is to schedule a call, then the Call should be able to be automatically scheduled by the prospect using a meeting scheduling tool.

Finally, after the call the autoresponder should keep sending emails for the next step which might be signing up for your service or buying your product.

The point is that everything from running Ads to closing the business is automated — the only manual step is to show up and do the webinar.

Some people are even recording their webinars and using that instead of live seminars.

Automation like this provides the means to scale endlessly without the need to use manual clerical staff.

John Doherty Twitter // johnfdoherty.com

~ Founder of @getcredo. Growth marketer. @distilled/@zillow/@hotpads alum. Speaker. Husband. Kingdom follower. Caffeinated ENTJ. Black lab owner.

My best tip for growing or scaling your business is to figure out where you are the bottleneck, then break that down.

By getting out of the way and either entrusting others to do it or stopping work that was not showing any movement forward, you’ll likely see your business start growing in new ways since you are now able to work on things that previously were left undone.

Along these lines, by automating tasks that you are currently doing manually (either via custom software or tools like Zapier or IFTTT) you can clear up time to work on new tasks

Josh Steimle Twitter // joshsteimle.com

~ Author #CMO book Chief Marketing Officers at Work, 200+ articles on Mashable, TechCrunch, Forbes, Time. @TEDx speaker, husband, dad, trail runner, agency CEO.

Make yourself 100% unnecessary

Don’t misunderstand–making yourself unnecessary is very different than making yourself useless. If you’re an entrepreneur, you may be familiar with the following scenario. 

You start a business, and at first you’re 100% necessary. You’re actually doing 10 jobs, even jobs you’re ill-suited for, because if you don’t do them, who will? But as you grow you begin to hire people to do those jobs, and if you’re smart you hire people who are much better at those jobs than you are.

But now you face another challenge. As you do fewer and fewer things, you begin to feel unnecessary, and that scares you. If you have partners you may even feel that your position in the company is threatened. Have you ever felt this way?

It’s at this point that many entrepreneurs get involved in the details again in ways that prevent them from scaling.

They hold onto tasks and jobs they should give to others who are better suited for them, and by so doing they often bring about the very consequences they’re afraid of.

The antidote is vision. If the entrepreneur understands what his business will look like at scale, he can chart his course from A to B, and he will see that following this path means although he must strive to make himself unnecessary, he’ll never succeed.

He’ll never succeed because the better he does at giving up jobs, the better and more necessary he will become as a leader, and the last thing anyone wants to do is get rid of a great leader.

Madeline Puckette Twitter // winefolly.com

~ Passionate about learning wine and all the wonderful places it takes us. http://winefolly.com/blog/ http://winefolly.com/subscribe/ (free!) http://winefolly.com/book/

The friends who tell you that you’re working too hard will never understand what it means to grow your own business.

Do yourself a favor and stop listening to them (or the part of yourself that tells you this too!). Follow the passionate obsession to figure out how to make your business successful.

Marc Nager Twitter // tellurideva.com

~ Helped build and grow Startup Weekend, ran UP Global, EIR at Techstars and now MD for Telluride Venture Accelerator

For a small company that is starting to scale quickly, my single biggest tip would be to ensure that you have taken time as a founding/executive team to write down your mission/values/key beliefs/strategies/primary business models used/etc.

We did this at Startup Weekend and UP Global, and I’ve worked with dozens of startups to do the same, and I truly believe it is one of the most powerful tools to tackle many challenges of growth including alignment, external communications, marketing strategy, preserving culture, recruiting, training, and many other things.

It serves as a true north whenever there are questions or concerns. Leaders within the organization should feel like they are pointing to and quoting the Manifesto like a broken record.

Think it is a waste of time? Absolutely not. Ensuring the leaders across your company are all using the same vocabulary and marching in the same direction is invaluable.

Ensuring that everyone in your company has access to the same document ensures great transparency that empowers team members to come up with new ideas and push back on potential distractions.

I’ve even see cofounders get in fundamental disputes around what should go in this document, leading to an entirely different understanding of the business altogether that could have been fatal if discovered too late.

It is a sign that there is extreme clarity on the direction of the organization and helps identify when things lie outside of core purpose since rapidly growing companies tend to be easily distracted.

We were originally inspired by a combination of Jim Collin’s Good to Great and Valve’s Employee Handbook. A copy of our very first one is here. As you can imagine, this document can evolve along with the company. We found that we needed to revisit it every ~2 years.

Matt Wolfe Twitter // mattwolfe.net

~ Founder at http://MultiplyAuthority.com -Become a brand, Build an audience, Provide Value, Profit

The best piece of advice that I can give for growing your business is to put a ton of focus into content creation and truly become the recognized expert in your niche.

Every business that we have helped build, we worked to write blog posts, create videos, get featured on other people’s platforms like their podcasts and their blogs, and truly focused on helping people before ever asking for a single dollar.

Much of this content creation can even be outsourced. We often hire writers to create well-researched content as a “rough draft.” They’ll then pass the content over to us so that we can add our own voice and additional commentary into it.

Creating this content helps us build a bond and a trust between us and our potential clients so that, when they are ready to purchase, we are the obvious and “top of mind” choice for them.

Another piece of advice is to not be afraid to invest.

With the proliferation of internet businesses and low startup costs, people are becoming less and less willing to spend money to create their business.

While there is something to be said for bootstrapping and staying lean, often the only way to truly scale a business is to get out of your financial comfort zone and invest in things like paid advertising, reputable web developers, and professional copywriting for your sales messages.

If you’re not willing to take some risks and get out of that financial comfort zone, you are probably not fit to be an entrepreneur

Mike Kawula Twitter // socialquant.net

~ CEO @theSocialQuant Social Media Twitter Marketing Startup driving businesses Leads & Sales! Entrepreneur, Author & Inc. 500 Alum http://bit.ly/mkawula

I want to give you the best tip ever for not only surviving, but growing your business tremendously over the next 10 years.

You ready?

No Excuses. Just GSD (Get Stuff Done)!

As striving future successful entrepreneurs, the majority of us:

• Grind daily
• Sacrifice tremendously (we’ll work 80 hours a week making nothing so as not to work 40 hours a week to make money for someone else)
• Are doggedly, sometimes ruthlessly, determined

 But sadly, 9 out of 10 business owners are taught a lesson (some say fail) in the first 10 years.

Why? What are the surviving 10% doing differently since we all grind, sacrifice and are determined?

Here’s what I’ve learned that those other 90% aren’t doing.

Those that don’t make it simply aren’t GSD (Getting Stuff Done), at least not the right stuff.

I owe so much thanks to Michael Gerber for his book, The E-Myth. Reading that book changed my life in 2001 when I became an entrepreneur.

This book’s lessons have helped me grow multiple million-dollar businesses over the last 15 years. I learned the importance of creating systems and making sure that I’m always working on my business instead of working in my business.

You see, many entrepreneurs are busy playing business, but they aren’t necessarily doing what drives business growth.

You say you want to grow/scale your business?

Ask yourself at the end of each week, “Did I move the dial, did I show ROI, and did I GSD?”

Focus on the following 4 things and you’ll scale (and scale fast, you will):

Week 1: Create 5 different traffic sources to your business

Week 2: Create 5 different ways to activate (turn to customers) that traffic once they arrive

Week 3: Create 5 ways to retain those customers once you’ve got them

Week 4: WOM Baby – Word of Mouth Marketing: Create 5 ways your organization can get your customers to refer you to others

 That’s it. At the end of each month, measure these results and look at the areas you need to refine and then repeat.

This is all you should focus on. It really is that simple.

No Excuses. Just GSD!

Noah Fleming Twitter // noahfleming.com

~ Highly sought-after business strategy consultant, speaker, and the author of the Amazon #1 Bestsellers, Evergreen: Cultivating the Enduring Customer Loyalty that Keeps Your Business Thriving and The Customer Loyalty Loop: The Science Behind Creating Great Experiences and Lasting Impressions.

Don’t forget about your existing customers.

In the business world, customer retention is boring, and marketing & optimization (especially around acquiring new customers) is sexy.

It feels great, and you get practically immediate feedback on how good your marketing is and if it’s working. No question about it, the ability to stimulate immediate sales is sexy.

But I’m not convinced it is doing us any good in the long run—especially when organizations aren’t focused on keeping the customers they just spent a bundle of cash to get.

Immediate marketing results–like impressions, conversions, traffic, sales, e-mail open rates, and new customers–is all attractive stuff. The thrill of the chase.

The satisfaction of the successful seduction. I get it. But it’s got nothing on long-term customer retention, which is more analogous to a relationship.

Real growth in business is directly correlated to the relationship with your customers, and it will survive long past the initial glitz and glamor of that first encounter, and it’s ultimately far more fulfilling for both parties.

Nearly everyone and anyone can make the first sale. But to create long-term growth and perpetual profits, you need to be constantly asking how you can take the customer to the third sale, the fifth sale, the tenth sale, and beyond.

Ryan Biddulph Twitter // bloggingfromparadise.com

~ Seen at @virgin @forbes @foxnews @entrepreneur and @huffingtonpost. Wrote 126 eBooks. Retire to a life of island hopping at Blogging From Paradise.

My best tip for growing your business is using the concept of leveraging intelligently.

I used to focus heavily on just onsite factors when building my blogging business.

All well and good but I wasn’t reaching out, connecting with influential bloggers and leveraging my presence through their audiences.

I dove into guest posting and effective blog commenting with vim and vigor and, voila!

My eBook, audio book, and blogging course income streams grew because I spent a fair portion of my energy helping a collection of large, targeted, growing audiences versus trying to create on my cyber real estate alone.

Think of all the places online where your ideal customers meet. Guest post, comment on respected blogs, share your thoughts on forums and help people on high traffic, authority websites to leverage the freaking stuffing out of your presence.

Build bonds with current customers through your blog and email list but meet new customers and scale your business by leveraging your online presence through OPW: Other People’s Websites.

Always be helpful. Always have fun. Always be on the look out for new, authority blogs and forums from within your niche.

Shep Hyken Twitter // hyken.com

~ customer service and experience expert, keynote speaker and NYT bestselling author, helps companies deliver AMAZING customer service experiences!

One of my best tips for growing and scaling your business… Create customer loyalty. And, one of the best ways to do that is to be so good at what you do that you create confidence.

There’s an old saying: People like doing business with people they know, like and trust. The knowing and liking is easy.

All you have to do is have some good marketing materials that reflect your “brand personality,” and some friendly and engaging employees.

Your customers will hopefully like what your brand promises and like the people they interact with. But, the trust part is harder. That takes time, and can only come when the customer can predict their experience.

Customers want a consistent and predictable experience. And, when you can provide that, you start to earn their trust, which turns into confidence, which can ultimately create loyalty.

So, let’s talk about loyalty for a moment. Some people think that it is about a lifetime. It can become that. But, if you tell your employees that we want to create lifetime customers, it can become a daunting goal. So, let’s make this easier to scale.

Consider this. Loyalty is not about a lifetime. It’s about the next time. Every time. Ask yourself what I call the loyalty question: “Is what I’m doing right now with this customer going to make him or her come back the next time they need whatever it is that I do or sell?”

Are you handling that moment – that interaction – so well that they you are earning their trust and confidence. That’s one of the secrets to growing your business. Be that good. Create trust, build confidence and create loyalty.

Loyal customers come back, they buy more and they tell their friends, colleagues and family members about the amazing experience they have when they do business with your company.

Tim Bourquin Twitter // onlinereputation.com

~  Co-founder, AfterOffers.com, Entrepreneur and Angels Baseball Fan

In this world, ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. So once you have your idea up and running, how do you scale and grow beyond what you can execute alone?

I’ve owned and managed a business where I had 25 full-time employees and I spent 90% of my time on human resources. I also spent countless hours training employees.

When I sold that company, I decided my next business would focus on systems. Systems give you the keys to really scale up and grow.

Systems allow a company with 100 employees to grow to 500.  Systems also allow a “solopreneur” to grow from $1,000 in revenue to $100,000.

Systems are what allows my co-founder (my brother) and I to run our web platform company with just two full-time employees – us. Growing and scaling your business doesn’t necessarily mean hiring employees.

To me, scaling means growing profits. If you can do that without hiring full-time employees, even better.

Start by writing down processes (we use Evernote) for even the most mundane tasks you do every month. Then do everything you can to automate those processes with software.

You can hire terrific programmers on a project basis to automate those tasks and systematize as much of your business as possible.

I used to spend hours each week creating invoices and charging the credit cards of our customers. It now happens with just a few clicks.

That’s just one example, but the more things you can systematize, the more time you can spend on “big picture” tasks that will open new doors and new revenue streams for your company.

Figure out what you do that brings in the most revenue and automate, systematize and outsource everything else. That’s how you scale.

Tyler Zey Twitter // www.easyagentpro.com/blog/

~ We Connect Agents With Leads Though Content Writing, Website Design, SEO Services, And Even Logo Design!

The best advice I can give for scaling your business is to make the projects smaller. If you want to grow sales, you can do that in hundreds of ways.

You can grow it with digital or old fashion marketing. To start that process, pick a proven tactic, make it work for you, and then systemize every part of that working process.  

At that point, you have something that you can repeatably hire for and execute against.

The problem most people run into is they approach growing their business like a moonshot project.

They try to hire the best Google ads company to do it for them. Instead of creatively finding a solution themself, they push the heavy lifting off onto others. This almost always backfires and doesn’t work.

I think the biggest tip is to get granular and take action with yourself first.

Venchito Tampon Twitter // sharprocket.com.ph

~ CEO/Co-Founder of @sharprocketph, a word-class link building company and also a Filipino Motivational Speaker.

I’d rather be actionable sharing a tip on how to grow your online business instead of just a providing generic one. Here you go. If you are building your online brand from scratch, try to look for available communities online that can help drive consistent referral traffic to your website.

One good example of this is Quora. Quora is a community site visited by million online users to ask or answer questions related to specific topics they’re in. Here’s a screenshot of number of views I’ve received over the last month, simply by answering topically relevant questions in my industry (SEO and link building). It only takes 5 minutes of my time every day to answer Quora questions.

Participating in Quora threads is not only useful for brand exposure but in generating qualified leads for your online business. I do receive client inquiries from people who have seen my answer in Quora. You can start by finding relevant questions or community sub threads in Quora (do a search for “keyword” or “topic”) and you’ll see the top questions related to that search query.

List down all questions you are capable of answering, base it primarily on your expertise. Then start answering each question you have in your list, one by one, each day. The more you answer questions, the easier it’ll be for you to build a personal brand in Quora and become their top writers.

Wendy Weiss Twitter // www.coldcallingresults.com

~ Author, speaker, sales trainer, and sales coach. She is a leading authority on lead generation, cold calling and new business development.

Prospect every day – no matter what.

Far too many business owners go through the boom and bust of being incredibly busy one day and not having anything coming in the next. Here’s the typical scenario:

1.      Business owner is frantically looking for new business.

2.      Business owner finds an opportunity and closes the sale—Yippee!

3.      Business owner drops everything and focuses solely on executing what needs to be done for that particular new customer. Business owner is incredibly busy.

4.      Business owner finishes up everything that needs to be done for the new customer, looks around and realizes there is nothing in the pipeline.

5.      Business owner panics and starts frantically looking for new business.

What is the solution to this dilemma? Stop the boom and bust. Always be looking for new business no matter what.

Then, make sure to document your new business development process. Make your process replicable so that eventually others can do it too.

Zac Johnson Twitter // zacjohnson.com

~ Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, Blogger and Super Affiliate by Day, Super Hero at Night

When it comes to growing and scaling a business, it’s all about having automation in play and making sure your content is working for you at all times.

This is especially true when focusing on online marketing and using content to keep new audiences coming back to your site.

The best way to accomplish this is through several component and methods, which I’ve laid out for you below.

1. Know your audience and figure out what they want
2. Analyze the competition and create something better
3. Use custom content and social media to get exposure
4. Create infographics and shareable content to scale in size
5. View reports on your search rankings and focus on improvement

Yes, it’s easier said than done, but it’s a model that does work. You can see this exact formula in place within my make money blogging guide, which has over 2,000 words of actionable and step-by-step content, while also including an original infographic along with it.

This helps with the outreach, link building, social sharing and search ranking process.

Analyze where you currently are within your industry and create a platform that targets your audience with valuable content, then putting in the necessary steps so it continues to work for your days, months and years after it’s original publication.

Taking action.

You too can now start adopting a scalable business model and make that a priority; your business can boost its profits without all the obstacles that plague traditional growth systems.

If you have any comment, question or suggestion for about this article or any upcoming posts, leave your comment in the section below.

Tor Refsland www.timemanagementchef.com

“What’s your best tip for growing/scaling your business?

Let´s not beat around the bush.

You want to grow your business, right?

Well, then you need to build your business around your strengths, so you will have a competitive advantage.

Most so-called experts chant about building your business around your passion…

…and that´s cool and all that.

However, if you don´t build your business around your strengths, you are spending your time on a freakin´ hobby and you are on track to adding yourself to the statistics of failed businesses.

Here´s an example.

Let´s say a guy, and we´ll call him Peter, was working in a sales department in big company, and he really wanted to start his own business to quit his job.

Peter was kicking *ss with everything related to sales, and he really sucked at painting.

But Peter had this BIG passion for starting a business and living of his painting, even though he SUCKED at it.

You get my point. In order for Peter to have any chance at all to succeed with his business, he should build his business around his strengths.

And if you are able to build your business around your strengths, and you have passion as well…

…then you can become unstoppable.

One of my super powers is that I am able to get massive results on any activity that I decide to focus on.

So I used this skill when it came to building my business.

And how did I do it?

When I started out I did this to grow my presence on social media.

I got 2000 targeted Twitter followers in 38 days without spending a dime on advertising.

And then I did the same when it came to generating traffic, comments and social shares to my website.

I published a blog post and got 20,231 page views in 6 days with a new blog. The post has now 106 comments and 1800+ social shares.

But all off the above doesn´t mean sh*t when it comes to you building your business.

Here´s the thing…

I will now tell you something that most people WON´T tell you…

Are you ready?

ALL of the above are pure vanity metrics. Yep, I said it.

It´s like having a nice Ferrari in your garage that doesn´t work. It looks pretty awesome, but it´s totally useless.

Then I applied the same tactic to increase my conversion rate.

I found a way to get an average of 18,2 % conversion rate on my blog posts. Yeah, that means that for every 100 unique visitors that hit your blog post, you will get 18 new opt-ins. And that is pretty good. At least that´s what Bryan Harris from Videofruit told me on our last Skype call.

The reason why you really want to succeed with your business is of course to build a tribe of loyal fans, help a lot of people transform their lives and make the world a better place, right?

But that is kind of mandatory in order to succeed with your business…

…or at least it should be.

At the end of the day you need to generate revenue to pay your bills.

You can´t really pay your milk and bread at the local general store with a snapshot of your social media following. At least that doesn´t work in Norway.

Okay, so how do you actually start earning money FAST?

I discovered that…

What you really want to do is to position yourself as an authority so you can attract premium clients.

How do you do that?

Through getting PR to you and your brand.

Now you´re probably thinking “Eh, Tor? PR is cool and all that. But will that really help me to become an authority and attract premium clients?”

Good question, indeed!

Judge for yourself…

I got featured on 158 blogs in my first 14 months of blogging. I won several awards, including winner of “Most Epic Blog Post” category on Jon Morrow´s blog.

And want to hear something really crazy? I recently got published in a book with some of the best marketers and bloggers in the world: Seth Godin, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan and Grant Cardone.

Yup, I still can´t believe the last part.

And how has this helped my business?

Now I am able to attract premium clients who really want to take their business to the next level. One of my coaching clients was earning $1000 per month when he started working with me. After 66 days he had generated $100 000 in sales.

Since I am giving my clients awesome results, I have been able to 10x my hourly rates…

…and 10x my income in a few months. I am now on track to 20x my income compared to last year.

But let´s jump a few steps back.

How was I REALLY able to position myself as an authority and massively grow my business?

The secret is that I was able to build genuine relationships with influencers online.

And how did I do that?

Well, through focusing on mastering one skill…

…how to blog outreach like a boss. “

Tor Refsland
Creator of How To Blog Outreach Like A Boss