10 Ways to Drive Growth in Your Business Right Now

With market conditions continually changing and a market that has seen dramatic up and down shifts in a short amount of time, retailers need to take control and drive their own growth. Here are ten ways to write your own growth story and not leave it in the hands of the market fates.  

1. Get in a growth mindset. Look at growth-based metrics like basket size, conversion rate and sales per employee. Set a baseline for where you currently stand based on your own performance and industry averages and set realistic goals from there, implementing a system for monitoring progress and bringing employees into the plan with incentivization. 
2. Focus on basket size. Customers are already in your store, so look at ways to get them to buy more with strategies like offering item of the month promotions, utilizing dump bins, rotating endcaps and mixing up impulse items. 
3. Strive for continuous improvement. There is no finish line for highly successful retailers because they are constantly focused on improving their business and this focus on improvement is built into all aspects of their planning.
4. Focus on culture. Go beyond your mission statement and take a close look at how you interact with customers, employees, vendors and the retail community. A good grasp and understanding of where a business culture is and where you want to take it can have as big an impact as any other operational or strategic goal. 
5. Embrace growth and don’t make excuses. Growth is the engine for every other aspect of my business. Growth doesn’t necessarily mean store count, but it means not being content with doing what you did last year. Sometimes you hit, sometimes you miss, but highly successful retailers are not satisfied with the status quo. 
6. Build a bench. Highly successful retailers do not want to be the only shot callers in their business.
   They realize that having a high-functioning team is paramount to their ability to have a highly-functioning operation. They spend time investing in key players and focus on mentoring.
7. Have a plan. Develop monthly, quarterly, three-year and long-term plans to reach your goals. These plans are often fluid and get more vague the longer out the goals, but they provide a roadmap for the retailer and their team.
8. Think like a shark. Just like a shark has to constantly keep moving to stay alive, successful operators keep moving and don’t allow outside forces to dictate whether they grow. They take charge of growth.
9. Keep it simple. Planning doesn’t need to be complicated, and like any good habit, things take time to develop and discipline to maintain. Break things down into what you can do today to be better than you were yesterday.
10. Look at both sides of the growth equation. You need to take into account top-line growth (what you sell) and bottom-line growth (what you keep). Top-line growth without bottom-line growth is relatively meaningless and bottom-line growth without top-line growth is like a sugar rush and may signal a longer-term issue.

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