“What do you want your marketing to do for you?” is a question I ask on almost a daily basis. “Get more customers!” is the most common response. Sounds logical, right? Wait a sec, though. Do you really want more? If you doubled your amount of customers, could you really handle that much business? That’s a tough question, isn’t it? This article will help you understand if you really want more customers, and what you should consider before you grow your business.
Estimated reading time – 2 minutes
New customers – the most difficult way to grow your business
Think about each of the customers your company has earned. It’s hard work, right? Either you have to convince someone to buy something they’ve never bought before, or convince them to move from their current product/service of choice to yours. The former requires a great deal of education, while the latter requires displacing a relationship with which a customer has already become familiar.
After you earn new customers, you then need to create the systems to support them. Everything from accounting to customer relationship management (CRM) will require administrative work. Don’t get me wrong, new customers are awesome. There’s one very important caveat, however.
Multiplying your business will multiply your inefficiencies too
If your business has any inefficiencies, multiplying your business will multiply these inefficiencies as well. If you’re already slow sending invoices – because you’re busy servicing your existing clients – adding more customers is not going to help your accounts receivables issues. If you and your staff are performing on-site service work at 20 different client sites, adding another few will exacerbate non-billable travel time. There are dozens of examples of these issues for both product & service-based businesses, and they all need to be considered before accommodating more customers.
“So you’re telling me I don’t want more customers? What am I supposed to do to grow my business, then?” you may be thinking. Don’t worry. There’s an easier way to grow, and it’s much more profitable than just adding customers. The secret lies with the customers you already have. This is what I did to successfully grow and sell my IT consulting company. Read about it in the next article in this series – How to increase profits: maximize before you multiply.
Excellent article, Spence! It’s very important to question the assumption that more customers are better for one’s business. It’s also crucial to know what needs to be in place to support these new customers. In my case, it depends on the type of client as well. I may have one client that requires 4 hours a month vs a client that needs 15 hours per month. I am very selective about the clients I take on because I have a finite amount of time and resources available, and like to work with clients long term.
For some business owners, adding more staff to accommodate the increase in customers seems to be the answer, but once again there needs to be an investment of resources and time to train these new people on the company culture and brand, in addition to processes.