The Three Pillars of Growth: An Idea.
Too often, entrepreneurs are fixated on only a single pillar of business. Product Design... New Customer Acquisition or Day to Day production. This will KILL your business.
IIn this guide, I'm going to pass along what I've explored as a very actionable idea. The Three Pillars of growth can apply to virtually any business. You may need to tweak the idea for service-based industries however, overall, the concept has proven to be a useful framework for business growth.
What are the Three Pillars of Growth?
The Three Pillars of Growth are: Customers, Frequency, and Average Order Value.
If you can increase these together rather than one at a time, you'll see a big bump in revenue.
Pillar One: Customers
Pillar Two: Frequency
Pillar Three: AOV
Customers
The first pillar of growth is increasing overall customers. Too often businesses are trying to increase customers by some crazy number, each year... rather than increasing customers parallel to the other strategies.
How do you increase customers? This is not an easy question to answer. Because it depends on your product. The general answer is to use some form of advertising. Word of mouth is the single most effective way to generate new business, but you can't buy it and guarantee its existence. The best you can do is find advertising that positively stimulates your existing promoters in the market and have a brand that people care about. Carter Venture Solutions can help you with this portion of the three pillars through digital marketing and branding strategy if that's what you decide you're ready for. .
Frequency keeps the lights on.
The second pillar of growth is frequency.
How can you help your existing or new customers increase overall frequency of purchase?
Customer experience and quality control is absolutely key here. This is the relationship portion of the business. But it's not all about feelings... it's also about a concept called "retargeting".
There are a dozen and a half ways to "retarget" your customers and bring them back. One more thing you can figure out on your own or call and let us help with.
Here's some freebies: Email Retargeting, Geo Retargeting, Website Retargeting, thank you cards, Birthday cards... alright, I'll stop... you get the idea.
Average Order Value. Upsell That Shit.
We are all familiar with the old "would you like fries with that" upsell. How has it evolved?
Adding a couple dollars to each average order value rather than trying to sell entirely new lines of products is the novel idea many businesses miss.
If you go to a website... like amazon for example and buy something... it's going to suggest a few other items on your way to the checkout. This is upselling online.
If you go to an advertising agency and ask for... say... radio commercials. They have an opportunity to upsell you to an annual contract, or short sell unused inventory.
If you go to a retail store, there are impulse low-ticket items near the checkout. It seems so obvious now... I hope! UPSELLING AND INCREASING AOV IS EVERYWHERE! Does your business have well developed mechanisms to upsell?
Are you with me? Is this making sense to you?
If you have 10 customers that buy a $10 product or service from you one time... you've made $100.
Congratulations.
Instead, how can we make those 10 customers into 12 customers that buy 1.5 times for an average value of 12$ an order?
Just in case you were wondering what that equals: $216... that's right... more than double the revenue.