Aqua Blue
- Nov 11, 2021
- 5 min read

Finding Opportunities to GROW your Small Business

Updated: Jan 11, 2022

"Coffee is Opportunity" Finding opportunities for small businesses — Finding Opportunities to grow your Small Business

Find amazing and surprising opportunities to increase your small business revenue by taking the time to dive into your business environment. It’s doesn’t have to be a burden and can be financially rewarding.

Examining your Small Business Environment

Regularly reviewing your market is a prerequisite to predict change or find growth opportunities for your small business. It's important to look both inside your company and outside to get the full picture of your situation. As you read, you'll be thinking, "I already do some of this" but it's like baking a great cake. If you put all the right ingredients together you get a fantastic cake but if you leave bits out, it can be a flop. LET'S GET STARTED so you're not a flop

Looking inside your business - Your Strengths and Weaknesses

The Customer

Do you regularly collect feedback from your customers ?

How did you find us?
How has the experience been with our business?
What would you wish our business provided?

There are many ways to collect feedback, I personally find that we're more honest with feedback when it's anonymous.

Set up a page on your site for feedback.
Why not sit with a group of you customers and get their feedback.
Ask 10 random customers for online feedback with a discount?
Pay a couple of people to play with your site and make a purchase and get them to share their experience
When customers come into your store, provide them with a feedback card that they can fill out or go to a site to complete. People love giving feedback when they're not happy

One question alone can provide you with great insight. "Would you recommend our business to a friend from 1-10?" Here is a link to the NPS (net promotor score) which is an extremely effective question to find opportunities in your business. 0-6 are detractors, while 7 & 8 are passive and the customers that give you a 9 and 10 are likely to promote you. Following this response you can ask 1 or 2 clarifying questions. If they give you an 8 or below, ask, how can we make it a 9? If they give you a 9 then ask them would they provide feedback on social media or google.

Never waste an opportunity to build credibility for your business. Building positive feedback is an important trend in today's digital world

Your Staff or Suppliers

Your employees are often the face of your business, ask them for areas they think the business could improve. You'll start to see opportunity trends emerge as you match both suggestions from your staff and customers feedback.

Internal Metrics and Financial Results

Look at all the internal results you can find. How many people enter your business and take action etc.
What is the average sale of a customer? Are there opportunities for repeat sales?
Do you have digital metrics that are meaningful to you. There is so much data you can get from your digital channels that show opportunities but a lot can be misinterpreted as well

It's important to gather facts to really understanding where opportunities lie, if you're not collecting these facts, you need to start. I'm a member of a gym and there are so many gyms in my area and many fail within the first couple of years. The gym collects the number of people entering the premises electronically but it doesn't know how long people stay or which machines are used the most. These numbers alone could help the owner understand which machines to get more of and which to sell off. If you don't have supporting data, you're guessing and guessing is costly. The gym wants to foster habit so members both utilise their business but are a repeat customer. It's easier and cheaper to keep current customers than find new ones.

Looking outside your Business - Opportunities and Threats

How big is your target market?
What does your market look like (demographics) age, sex, race or religion?
What are the behaviours of your target audience?

It's important to examine the demographics of your target area. You may notice that many small businesses go out of business as they haven't catered to the changing demographics of their audience. You may see a new development on the outskirts of you area bringing in families or the population is aging. These are trends you need to prepare for. There are so many places to get this demographic data - just google your area and demographics and you'll find the data. Here is an example from the UK of the great statistics you can get. Once you have this data, draw a picture of what you market looks like today and is likely to look like in 5 to 10 years.

Great example of Changing Demographics. A new hair salon wants to open but the region is cluttered with salons and have a faithful local client base so grabbing new clients is going to be extremely. Many would walk away and give up on their dream but as a new salon but this business owner took a look at the local demographics and saw the growth in the "english speaking expat community". Most salons are still serving local language customers and trying to cope with English expats rather than cater to them. One salon chose to specialise both their services and customer experience to this specific customer.After deep dives with customers, they took the best of the local experience that customers already had and then they examined the best of what their customers had from their home country and combined the two. English speaking customers now feel they’re getting a specialised service with a local vibe and home experience. They also combined services around the hair salon, beauty, nails and wedding specialistation. The helped expand their market to the same audience.

Competitors and Adjacent Businesses

How are competitors performing?
What are customers saying about your competitors?
Have you ever visited your competitor and spoken to the owner?
What can you learn on from them?

It's easy to just focus on your competitors but it's important to look at trends in adjacent businesses like the example above. If you run a cafe, look at things restaurants are doing to lead in their market. Competitors will provide you with a view of your position in the market but adjacent businesses will provide you with a view into potential growth opportunities.

Bringing together the internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats to develop business strategy

Completing the above process can take a couple of days to a month but start to collect the opportunities that exist in your market and if they match your businesses strength areas then take full advantage of them. If you're seeing some threats and know this is where your business is weak, it's important to then work on how you can overcome these threats. It's important to list the top 3-5 opportunities and threats and set out a plan