This article outlines 4 specific tools you can use to boost your business right now. If you’re looking to start, grow, stabilise or scale a business then you need to read this.
Covid does not have to mean crisis: there has never been a better time to Kickstart your business and skyrocket it into the 4th or even the 24th dimension.
So, why not reverse engineer this concept and use its lessons to start that business you have always dreamed of doing but which has always been confined to the dustbin of history along with meaningless excuses. So, here three top tips to do exactly that:
- Enrol in a mentoring program.
Get yourself on to a great mentoring programme to learn new skills, develop and identify your business idea and learn to road test it before launch, ensuring guaranteed success.
Grow Inspires runs a rather clever mini accelerator programme called Project Phoenix which does exactly what it says on the tin: it raises you Phoenix-like from the ashes to achieve your wildest dreams. However, it does this in a thorough and process driven way, which is the key to its success. By focusing on what you like to do, what you enjoy doing, what lights you up and what energises you it quickly gets you to turn your passion into profit. By ensuring that your business is both fit for funding and bullet proof before launch, it will save you hours as well as pounds. Spending time really identifying who your clients are, how much they will spend and more importantly, will they buy what you have to sell, is key.
Check it out at: www.growinspires.org
2. Get FREE, fully funded, employees through the Kickstart program
Get yourself signed up to the Government’s Kickstart scheme
Many hands make light work, right? Utilising the Kickstart program you can take on staff to pick up the slack, free you from your admin, research and explore new opportunities, support you with marketing and sales outreach and so much more. The best bit about this is it’s completely free!
This is a fantastic way to help your business grow in a recession but also help to give a young person between the ages of 16-24 a head start. The Government will pay for an employee for you for six months for 25 hours a week. So, check it out at: https://growinspires.org/kickstart-program another amazing way to boost your business.
3. Join a Proactive and Interactive Networking Group
There are loads of networking groups which have mushroomed up all around us online, however, choose one, stick with it and treat it as your family. Get to know people, get to trust them and build relationships. People who dismiss networking as something for the fool hardy are missing a serious trick! Networking done properly will render its cash results in gold. You will build strong, trusted and lasting relationships, but more importantly just like the proliferation of the R Rate, you will have a ready-made marketing team who will bat for you even when you cannot bat or are too tired to bat for yourself. In a culture of isolation, this is an absolute MUST.
Love Entrepreneurs does just that: the only requirement for membership is a desire to be an entrepreneur. Note the use of the word “desire” not “must have” – it is this network’s balance between sharing experience, strength and hope amongst its members which truly sets it apart. The Big Fix, which is its signature dish is quite mesmeric, in that it enables businesses which join to road test their ideas amongst a trusted group of like-minded fellows, who will come up with more ideas than you could ever have imagined possible. And all this at a very reasonable price tag of £25 a month which may also be paid in Silva (see below). Grow Inspires has organised for its Phoenix graduates to receive complimentary memberships of this progressive, fast-growing and results rendering network. So, go forth and investigate.
4. Trade your spare capacity for services you need to grow or support your business with Silvatree – (www.silvatree.co/gb/)
Probably one of the most innovative business concepts to have come out of Bristol in the last decade; Silvatree is a new cashless business economy enabling you to pay for your goods and services with your own goods or services. It is innovative as it taps into spare capacity which let’s face it is all around us at the moment, i.e. anything we have either not sold or services we are not providing to a cash paying client right at this moment in time. This new business, which is in addition to your usual business, is charged out in Silvatree’s own currency which is called Silva, (or part Silva part cash), which is then used to pay for things which you would normally pay for in cash, therefore not only keeping hard cash in your business to get you through this recession but also enables you to pay using business you have never even had before. Magic!
Silvatree essentially monetizes time. All time is an opportunity to sell or to trade, but let’s be honest, we don’t often use most of it, or indeed recognise it. Think of all those empty tables in a restaurant, or printing presses which are not running, empty hotel rooms which if not used that night, will be lost forever, or coaching sessions that are empty because you have no clients. Silvatree provides and exceptional 21st century innovative twist on the ancient concept of barter which makes you more profitable, guarantees you more clients and conserves cash within your business where it belongs.
Project Phoenix graduates also receive a complimentary membership.
Grow Inspires in an eco-system of tools and resources to support small businesses to thrive.
If you’re interested in any of the resources mentioned in this article then please feel free to get in touch with our team for more information.