Matthew Sheridan of Nix Sensor featured in Forbes

5 Things All Growth-Obsessed Leaders Do feat. Matt Sheridan of Nix Sensor

Featured on Forbes by editor: Serenity Gibbons

Growth is something every business wants to achieve — but there’s no denying that some businesses are a lot better at it than others. Just like the military lifestyle demands growth of who you are as a person, the business world demands exponential growth of your company and its bottom line.

Where would you rather be: running a business that just stays stagnant year after year, or one that sees its profits increasing by 30, 50 or even 100 percent? It’s a safe bet that most business leaders are going to choose the latter whenever possible.

That kind of explosive growth doesn’t happen by accident. You can’t wish it into being. Growth-obsessed businesses go out there and make it happen — and in this article, I show how you can, too.

1. Develop Clear Growth Goals

Growth-obsessed businesses take goal-setting seriously. They take a deep dive into their actual numbers to understand how much they’re making each month, and how they’re doing it. Using that information, they then set goals for where they want to be one month, one quarter or one year in the future.

These aren’t just empty, randomly chosen goals. Growth leaders evaluate which strategies are working and which ones aren’t. They identify specific actions they need to take if they want to achieve that goal. While they may not always reach their desired goal, the simple fact of having a goal is what gets them moving in the right direction.

2. Recapture Existing Customers

Far too many business owners focus their energy on trying to get new customers. In reality, growth-obsessed brands put just as much — if not more — energy into getting more sales out of the customers they already have.

With brand new prospects, sometimes you’re taking a total shot in the dark. With repeat customers, you’re already engaging with a warm lead. This offers a far more efficient way of working with a much higher success rate.

3. Ask for Referrals

Those same customers who are likely to buy from you again are also a good source of new customers. If someone had a positive experience with your brand, there’s a good chance they’re going to recommend you to others in their circle who are facing a similar problem.

Of course, growth-obsessed businesses aren’t going to leave referrals to chance. They will go out of their way to incentivize customers to refer friends, family or business associates. For example, I know a landscaping company that offers $50 to $100 Amazon gift cards to customers for every referral who does business with them.

That may seem expensive, but for services that net the business thousands of dollars per project, this is an amazingly cost-effective way to ensure a steady flow of warm leads.

4. Generate Passive Income

As a business leader, you only have so many hours in a day. Even if you have employees you can delegate some of your work to, it can sometimes be hard to get the massive growth larger businesses enjoy.

This is why one of the smartest things you can do is find a way to generate passive income to supplement the ongoing work you do for your clients. With passive revenue streams, you can increase your earning potential without needing to double your workload.

There are many ways you could generate passive income, from ebooks and online courses where you share your knowledge to offering a subscription-style version of your service that complements one-off projects or orders.

5. Continually Analyze New Opportunities

It doesn’t matter who your target audience is or what type of services you offer. There are always going to be new opportunities on the horizon. It might be a new channel for reaching customers, a competitor going out of business or even improving your own skills so you can offer new services.

For example, Matthew Sheridan, founder and CEO of Nix Sensor, was able to create and market an award-winning colorimeter by tapping into the creative consumer audience. “Using customer feedback and industry advice, we optimized our product and software, providing features that were more useful to our customers. Because we focused on their feedback, we were not only able to improve our product, but we were also able to release our new flagship product to professionals, tech enthusiasts and designers in over 50 countries world-wide.”

Growth-obsessed businesses are actively monitoring their industry and the business world as a whole so they can identify new opportunities and determine if they are a good fit. A proactive approach enables you to become an early adopter, leading to much greater growth potential.

Time to Grow
Your ability to grow your business is never 100 percent in your control. Changing markets and customer preferences are always going to play a role in just how much you can increase your bottom line in any given year.

But at the end of the day, your own efforts (or lack thereof) are the one thing that every great leader can control. By imitating the practices of other growth-obsessed businesses, you can go a long way in increasing your income and achieving your biggest business goals.

Read the Forbes article