To Encourage Business Growth, You Have To Turn Down Customers

When you’re first starting up your business, your primary focus should be building the foundations and a strong reputation for your business whilst slowly building your customer base. If you want to build a long-term, successful business, you need to ensure that you have a strong reputation and brand so your customers are satisfied whenever they interact with you. When you’re first starting up, you need to be selective with your initial client base and resist the urge to scale before mastering product/service delivery.

Be selective

To be successful, you have to be selective with your customers. You can’t have a product for everyone right of the bat, if your target market is too wide, they will all be too different and no one will take a real interest in your business. You want to be able to tailor your customers’ experience so you’re able to create exclusivity. Some of the best businesses are those who narrowly define who their customer is.

We’re not saying you can’t expand further along down the line, but to help you gain a core group of customers, it’s best to try and narrow your focus to accommodate for a particular segment of customers in your market. If you target a niche segment of customers in your market, then you’re almost guaranteeing yourself a solid foundation of customers which you’re able to expand on. You need to remember you’re just starting up and customers will be wary of your business, you need to create a sense of belonging and actually listen to your customer’s feedback, the more valued they feel, the more they’ll purchase your product.

Don’t scale too prematurely

This applies to all who are starting up or in the early years of their business. By acquiring many customers at the beginning can create an illusion that your business is growing, when realistically it’s not. You need to spend your time refining the customers experience before you try to attract a lot of customers. If you appeal to a lot and the customer experience is poor, they won’t return, but by building the perfect experience, you’re significantly increasing the chances of your customers sticking around.

What you will find more often than not, of the businesses who try to build a large customer base before refining the customer experience a lot of them have a huge number of unhappy customers, which already has a poor effect on your business’ performance as the chances of them returning are next to none.

Overall you have to ensure that your customers are happy with the process they go through to purchase your product or service.