I should grow my business "geometrically"?

I'd written a #SmarTini tip for Twitter and Facebook the other day stating that we should grow our businesses "geometrically".

It raised a few eyebrows to say the least.  After all, what the heck does THAT mean?!?

Here's what I mean when stating that all business owners should grow their business geometrically:

Rather than focus all your time on creating new products and services to sell to new customers and clients, you want to:

1. Sell EXISTING products and services to NEW clients,

2. Sell EXISTING products and services to EXISTING clients,

3. Sell NEW products and services to NEW clients and

4. Sell NEW products and services to EXISTING clients.

By spreading your marketing and promotion across these four categories, you ensure that:

1. You never have "all your eggs in one basket" or, better said, "all your clients in one program",

2. You minimize your product development costs since you continue to offer existing products to new clients (and existing clients) and

3. You minimize your new client acquisition costs since you focus on offering new and existing products to existing clients.

This describes the concept of growing your business "geometrically".

Give it a try -- I promise you won't regret it!  :-)

Comments

[Caryn Ginsberg, The Raw Designer, Inspired Raw Design]

Definitely opportunities in all 4 areas and diversification is a great risk-reducer... witness our current economy!

I've seen a lot of businesses (including multi-million dollar companies) look too quickly to new products without exploring whether they'd really maximized what they had already. There's an investment in new products and if you don't really know how to sell, that investment won't pay off. So people just need to be careful to make sure they're adding products for the right reasons.

There are similar issues with new vs. existing clients as you point out in re: making sure you sell both new and existing products to existing clients as much as possible vs. focusing all your energy on looking for new clients.

Great article. Thought-provoking as always! Thanks, Sandy.