Avoiding Growth for Growth's Sake is the Key to Long-Term Success

Avoiding Growth for Growth's Sake is the Key to Long-Term Success :

Yes, it is absolutely true that the vast majority of businesses that fail do so because of cash flow problems. They simply lack the insight and visibility into their funds that they need to not only plan for the future, but to take advantage of business opportunities when they arise.

But this is only one of the many, many potential reasons why a business might shutter its doors. If you had to make a list of the top ten reasons why organizations prematurely close, "cash flow" would absolutely be right at the top. But two of the other remaining items on that list are both directly related to the same basic thing: growth.

It's no secret that growing too slowly is a cause for concern, but a lot of people don't understand just how serious expanding too quickly can be, too. There are a laundry list of companies throughout history that ultimately went bankrupt because their owner tried to grow far too big far too quickly, causing everyone around them to pay a dear price as a result.

Avoiding growth just for the sake of it is one of the major keys to long-term success. It’s actually been one of the keys to our success at Visme which was bootstrapped to profitability slowly but consistently into one of the leading online Presentation and Infographic tools.

To that end, the types of marketing that you use and the other visual resources that you create will also play an important role in not only establishing the rate at which your organization continues to grow, but in terms of maintaining it as well.

Marching to the Beat of Your Own Drum:

First, it's important to get this out of the way as quickly as possible: there is truly no "one size fits all" approach to how you grow your company. Every organization is a little bit different and your goals will likely vary wildly from even those of your closest competitor. Only by sitting down and thinking holistically about your long-term desires will you be able to strategically build your way backwards towards the current day growth strategy that works for you.

Having said all of that, the most invaluable resource that you have in terms of not only acting on that growth strategy but maintaining it will be the marketing resources that you put out into the world.

Think about where your business currently is and where you hope it will be in a few year's time. Then, break the period of time in between down into a series of much more manageable, more actionable stages and make your primary goal to move from one to the other.

So when you're in Stage 1, for example, your goals are not to become the business that you want to be running in five years. Your goal is to move into Stage 2, which in turn will put you farther along the path towards accomplishing that macro goal.

Small, manageable, actionable steps. Slow and steady wins the race:

When you sit down to craft that marketing collateral, do so by always taking into consideration A) what stage you're currently in, and B) what exactly you need to do to move into the next stage at a sustainable pace.

Infographics created with a tool like Visme can be invaluable towards that goal, as they're excellent in terms of improving content retention based on the smaller, more intimately focused goal that you're currently working with.

Case in point: a big part of sustainable growth comes down to not necessarily cramming as many people into your sales funnel as possible, but moving them from one end of the funnel at the rate you need to sustain the growth you're after.

By building content like Infographics or even presentation around both the stage your business is currently in and the rate at which you're trying to grow, you can create the best experience possible on behalf of your lead and maintain that mission-critical momentum at the same time.

Then, you can re-use that content as you feed more people into the sales funnel in the future. Other types of content like presentations will also be invaluable towards that goal.

The beauty part of all of this is that you don't even need to be a designer with decades of experience under your belt to pull this off. Take a look at this free eBook that we created about how non-designers can create compelling presentations to learn more about what you'll need all throughout this process.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race:

In terms of not only creating the type of growth that your small business is going to need to survive, never forget the number one rule: "slow and steady wins the race."

Yes, everyone wants to start growing and generating as much revenue as possible as quickly as they can. But for a lot of different reasons, this is one urge that you're absolutely going to want to resist. You don't need just growth for the sake of it - growing far too quickly is almost as bad as not growing fast enough. Both don't leave you with the ability to hit the targets you need and put you down the type of potentially devastating path that you're going to have a hard time getting off of again.

Dependable, predictable growth is always better than random spurts or jumps in volume. The type of messaging you create and the marketing collateral that you put out into the world can absolutely help you keep this ultimately simple idea under control.

You may think that you need to be going after all of the business you can, but really all you're going to end up doing is draining your cash and reducing your long-term profitability.

Only by creating goal-focused marketing that targets the type of growth you need given your current stage will you have a chance at maintaining a necessary pace today, tomorrow and beyond.

About the Author:

Payman Taei is the founder of Visme, an easy-to-use online tool to create engaging presentations, infographics,  and other forms of visual content. He is also the founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning Maryland digital agency specializing in website design, user experience and web app development.