Small Businesses: Growth strategies to pick up from Google’s playbook

For a small business, much of the groundwork must be laid down by the entrepreneurs or founders. As an entrepreneur, you call the shots, and the success of your business levies greatly on the strategic expansion decisions that you make.  While you may own a small business at present, but the possibility always exists that your business may not always be a small business. Making the right decisions today could lead to a Domino effect where your business can grow into a large multinational enterprise eventually.

However, to be on the right growth track requires that you glean some much-needed tried-and-tested strategies from corporate giants like Google and Amazon that started off as a small business. It helps to plan on that scale. Based on insights, let’s take a look a look at some of these growth strategies that can help your business grow.  These strategies may seem deceptively simple but they are difficult to execute for most.

Focus on consistent value-engineering

Before you imagine yourself as a million or billion-dollar business owner, you need at least a million-dollar business idea. Ostensibly, having an idea that sets you apart from your competitors in terms and makes your offerings truly unique is an advantage.  Having a business model that helps you get distinguished from your peers in the competitive landscape is a good first step.

An article by the Harvard Business Review highlights that mapping your customer’s entire experience with your product or service helps immensely.  It also asserts that the most profitable business strategies are built around differentiation.

Consider Google, when it started out, it wasn’t the only search engine out there. There were many other established names like Yahoo! Ask Jeeves, Bing, and Escosia among others. However, Google managed to distinguish itself by consistently evolving and growing.  It focussed on quality instead of the quantity of search results: Offering the most relevant and best results instead of the most.  Now, your product or business does not have to be entirely new. Like Google, you can focus on business aspects that are new and pertinent instead.  The idea is to build elements that anticipate market needs that have previously not been focussed on.  An article by the Economic Times highlights that building a strong data model shall empower your business to take decisions of strategic relevance better.

Don’t put your eggs in one basket

Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, is involved in a wide range of businesses and owns some surprisingly large names, including YouTube, Waze, Fitbit, and other fitness wearable textile brands. Diversification is the name of the game for any business playbook today. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a sheer folly with regard to agility and flexibility. Consider, how your revenues will get affected if the business model, product, service or process becomes anachronistic or saturated.  This is likely to happen if your business model is created around a single product or sales strategy.

An article by Forbes highlights that nearly overnight, a business that offers a range of services can command a premium and see its revenues rise significantly.  Many physical therapists who provide diagnostic treatments, for example, find that they can charge an insurance $550 a session instead of $70 or $100 for a non-diagnostic appointment. With new services and diversification also means that you can compete better. The idea is to provide your target market the best outcome or experiences with your products and services.

The road ahead

Companies like Google and Amazon understand that expansion and diversification are critical of business growth. At the same time these companies never lose focus of their essential value proposition and only get better at it: Offer the best search results or e-commerce products and services.  A balanced approach has enabled them to further consolidate their value proposition in an ever-evolving market.