Business Growth Strategies That Pay Off for the Owner

The business growth strategies that work for an established business are the unglamorous ones: a pipeline full of real names, going back to past customers, referrals, partnerships, direct outreach, offers with a deadline instead of a discount, and pricing for margin, while you build a long-term marketing engine with more than one channel. And none of it counts unless the growth pays off for you, the owner.

YouTube, Spotify and the bookshop are absolutely saturated with how to make more money: more revenue, more marketing, more sales. What they’re not saturated with is how to get paid from that revenue. You’re better off with a £1m business that pays you £200k a year than a £10m business that pays you £100k. It’s not the revenue. It’s the profit, and what happens to it.

So every strategy below comes with one question attached: does this grow the bit that’s left for you?

What is a business growth strategy?

A business growth strategy is the plan for where your next customers, your next pound of margin and your next hire are coming from, and in what order. For an owner, it starts at the other end: the number you want the business to give you, then the profit, margin, revenue and price it takes to get there. I go through that order in how to pay yourself as a business owner.

Look, the same strategies don’t apply to everyone. A £1m business and a £100m business are playing different games, and there are different rules and different behaviours in different countries. A lot of the growth content out there jumps between the two in the same week. Everything here is for owners of established businesses who want to scale.

1. Build a pipeline of names, not numbers

If you keep running out of customers, you don’t have a customer problem. You have a pipeline problem. That’s a big difference, because the way we talk to ourselves matters. “I’m not good at getting customers” isn’t true. What you’re actually saying is you haven’t built a pipeline.

Start with names, not numbers. “We’ve got 10 leads” or “I made 50 calls this week” tells you nothing. Who did you call? People buy from people, so put their names on a board in front of you.

Where do the names come from?

• People and businesses you already work with.
• Friends and family who could introduce you to people.
• Businesses you’ve bought from. If you’re their customer, they want to see you win, and it should work the other way too.

Not a “dream 100” of names you’re never going to contact. Work your network. And don’t stop at a handful. Rather than a little pipe, you need a whole river flowing towards you: 100 names, and if 100 isn’t working, 500. Something happens psychologically when you’ve got a full pipeline, too. You stop needing any one person to say yes.

The rule of 10

For every 10 people you meet, two will really love what you do, but they might not be able to afford you yet or need you yet. One will really dislike what you do, and that’s not always a reflection of you. The other seven? They just don’t care. It’s not part of their world.

So if you’ve only got three people in your pipeline, you could easily be talking to the hater and two who don’t care. Move on to the ones who do care, and look after the two who love what you do until they’re ready.

2. Go back to past customers

Most people don’t do this. If you can hand on heart say you deliver a five-star service, there’s no reason a past customer can’t buy from you again.

Reach out personally. Make it about them: what they’re working on, where they want to get to, what’s new in the industry that could help. Something as simple as “We haven’t worked together in a while. Here’s what’s new. I’d love to help again.” If you don’t ask, you don’t get. And if they say no, ask: “Is there anybody I could help?”

This is personal work, not automation. When you need the next 10 customers to pay the bills, the team and the growth, a funnel isn’t where they’re coming from.

3. Grow through referrals, and stop treating people as leads

I don’t like the word “lead”. It assumes the person is going to buy something. When I’ve analysed where my own clients come from, they tend to come from people referring me on, and that only happens if they didn’t feel sold to.

An investor messaged me on LinkedIn wanting to book a slot in my diary. I said, mate, here’s my number, I’ll just call you. What was meant to be a 10-minute call turned into 40 minutes of “I know this person, I know that person.” No work came directly out of it. What did come out of it was introductions both ways. If I’d treated him as a lead to convert, none of that would have happened.

I get quite passionate about this. So many people see everyone as a dollar sign. Authentic growth comes from authentic connections. Ask your happy clients directly: “Who else do you know that needs this?” Be transparent about it, and point people to whoever can help them best, even when it isn’t you. A lot of people do the same for me.

4. Partner with businesses that already have your customers

Partnerships are one of the fastest levers you can pull, because you’re borrowing trust from someone who’s already in front of your audience. Who else deals with your customers? For me it’s accountants, because every business owner has one, and marketers, because their clients come to them wanting to grow, then get more enquiries than they know what to do with.

Then do the maths on a referral. Say you put £1,000 into ads and it brings you one customer worth £10,000, with a 5 to 10% chance of winning each enquiry. A referral comes from someone the prospect already trusts, so it’s more like a 50% chance. Paying a partner a thank-you for each referral, or giving it to their charity, makes a lot of sense when it saves you the ad spend.

5. Do the direct outreach

This is the one most people won’t do. Pick up the phone. If you don’t like the phone, send 20 personalised messages a day on LinkedIn, Instagram or WhatsApp. Daily if you want results fast, weekly if you want it consistent. Comment on other people’s posts; it builds relationships, and a lot of owners are missing out on it.

Alongside that, you should be doing consistent email marketing anyway, as one of your channels.

6. Use urgency, not discounts

Bundles and deadlines work. So does planning for your seasons: if you know the dip is coming, have the offer ready before it arrives.

Discounting is the easy way out. Take 5 or 10% off with your overheads and cost of sales already set, and especially in manufacturing, it really messes with your numbers. It’s probably part of why there’s nothing left to pay you. Usually what’s missing is the sales skill, not the price. Take the word “discount” away and ask what the customer actually wants: to feel like they’ve got more. So add something that’s valued at £1,000 but costs you £100. More on that in how to improve sales skills.

7. Fix price and margin before chasing more revenue

There are five levers: your pay, profit, margin, revenue and price. Most owners only ever pull revenue. Look at the other four and find the constraint, the one that’s capping you. Margins are where a lot of owners lose their money, because they eat away at the bottom line without anyone noticing.

Price is the other one. Price like your competitor, or cheaper, and you’re just being like them. So why would anyone pick you? Then they go cheaper again, and it’s a race to the bottom.

8. Build a long-term engine with more than one channel

The long-term stuff is good: email lists, outbound, partnerships, ads, funnels. But it’s not going to be one golden goose laying all the golden eggs. It’s more like 10 different ways of bringing in enquiries. Stop relying on one channel.

What I don’t like about it is that it takes a long time. The worst time to start building it is when you’ve got no customers, and there’s no better time than now. Run both: the hands-on work above for the results this quarter, and the engine for when you’re servicing so many customers that you can’t do it all yourself.

One warning when you pay someone to build it. If an agency charges you £10,000 to set it up, the £10,000 is a certainty for them. The return isn’t a certainty for you. So ask: where’s their risk?

Why do business growth strategies fail?

Usually it’s not the strategy. You can use any system you want; they’ll all make an impact. What won’t make an impact is the person delivering it, if they’re colluding with you because they’re scared of losing a client and won’t challenge you. It comes down to behaviour.

Your learning needs to be 10%. The execution needs to be 90%. Show me your diary and I’ll tell you how much you’ll get paid, because the time you spend drives your behaviour, and your behaviour drives the outcome.

And if you’re always back to hunting for customers, it’s not a sales problem. It’s a CEO problem. Find the one thing that’s capping you, not seven: demand, conversion, delivery, people or money. Not the next shiny thing that’s going to take over the world. A lot of what I do with owners is turn their head away from the distraction and back to their true north.

How do you know your growth strategy is working?

When your own payoff grows with the business. Profit you don’t plan to take gets reabsorbed: the business grows around you, the costs grow with it, and you’re still paid last. Put the dividend you want into the budget and the plan, and growth has to make room for it.

Frequently asked questions

What are the four main business growth strategies? The classic framework, the Ansoff matrix, gives four: market penetration (selling more to the kind of customers you already serve), market development (new markets for what you already sell), product development (new products for your existing customers) and diversification (new products in new markets). For most established owners, market penetration is the cheapest and fastest, and it’s what strategies 1 to 6 above are about.

What is the fastest way to grow a business? Start where trust already exists: past customers, referrals from happy clients, and partners who already serve your customers. They convert far better than cold enquiries, so they bring results faster than ads or a new funnel.

Should a business owner grow revenue or profit first? Profit, and specifically the part the business pays its owner. More revenue on thin margins means more work, more people and more risk without more money for you.

Want a second pair of eyes on your growth plan?

I’m a business coach and mentor in Birmingham, UK, who actually owns businesses. If you want a straight answer on where the constraint is in yours, book a virtual coffee, or see how working with me goes.