What is Organic Growth in Business?

Organic growth in business is the holy grail of sustained success. Every entrepreneur dreams of organic business growth but few actually achieve it.

Running a business can be challenging, especially as you deal with complex issues ranging from micro-operations to macro-management. Although Texas offers a great business environment with favourable tax structures and incentives, you might want to understand things first before jumping on the bandwagon.

So, if you want to quit your 9-5 job to start a business of your own, or if you already run a small business, you’ll find this article useful. Let’s uncover various strands of business operations to educate you on the art of organic growth in business. But first, 

What is organic growth in business?

Organic growth in business refers to the process of increasing a company’s revenue and market share through internal operations, without relying on external factors such as mergers and acquisitions. This type of growth is achieved by expanding a company’s customer base, increasing sales, and improving profitability through operational efficiency and innovation.

To achieve organic growth, a business may expand its existing product or service offerings, develop new products or services, enter new markets, or improve customer engagement and loyalty. These organic business growth strategies often require investments in research and development, marketing and advertising, and hiring new talent.

Organic growth is generally considered a more sustainable and less risky approach to business growth than relying on mergers and acquisitions. This is because organic growth allows a company to maintain its independence and control over its operations while building a strong foundation for future growth.

In addition, organic business growth typically results in higher profitability and return on investment over the long term.

What are the challenges of organic business growth?

Before we proceed to the elements of organic growth in business, we would like to discuss some challenges most entrepreneurs face. It is important that you understand the problems of organic growth in business before you look at their solutions.

You may be running your company smoothly, but as soon as you take a step toward organic business growth, you are marred by financial problems. This is often an indicator of poor financial management, especially a blatant disregard for due consideration that is vital for a company’s financial structure.

Similarly, retaining the desired talent also becomes a hurdle for many small business owners as they fail to offer the incentives that workers require after giving their blood and sweat to the company. This results in the company losing the fuel that would otherwise power its engine as it heads toward growth.

Moreover, since not every entrepreneur has an educational background in business, the lack of proper knowledge, particularly regarding scaling one’s business, becomes a hurdle.

If you are based in Texas, you can attend some brilliant colleges to learn. However, if you would like to attend an online program, there are various online MBA programs Texas has to offer that allow flexibility and diverse course options for students.

How can a business expand through organic growth?

There are many other challenges that entrepreneurs commonly face when trying to grow their businesses organically. You can look them up for further learning. The next part of this article will now discuss the different ways to pursue organic business growth.

1. Evaluate your position

You can’t really make a change unless you know where you are standing. The same principle applies to business. If you want to steer your business toward growth, you need to evaluate its current position. This includes every aspect, ranging from finances to operations.

So, evaluate how the company has been performing lately and what issues you’ve been running into. Similarly, you need to assess how the company’s operations have been. This should give you a good idea about your current standing and help you identify your business’s weaknesses.

2. Streamline finances

Once you evaluate your business, you can then proceed to corrective procedures. The first one, obviously, pertains to finances. You can’t do well unless your company’s finances are in order. Good financial management is an important element of business success, so delve into this with the utmost care and seriousness.

You need to assess whether you need to spend more and in which departments or whether circumstances require your business to operate with austerity. This depends on the factors you’ve identified in the previous step, so this needs to be your call after a thorough evaluation. There is no hard and fast rule here.

3. Streamline operations

Once you have your finances in order, you must start looking into your company’s operations. At this stage, you need to scale your business properly.

You need to see whether you have the required manpower to enable your business to reach the heights you desire. You also need to see whether the business’s ability to grow is being hampered. This is essential for streamlining operations.

Once you do this, you are in a better position to make the required changes. If important departments of the company are understaffed and would perform better with the right talent, you need to recruit more people. If the lack of professionalism hurts business operations, you need to establish new policies. 

4. Understand your competition

Many believe they can make it big by focusing on their products and customers. While this formula works in select areas, it, unfortunately, doesn’t work in established markets. You can’t do well unless you do better than those you are competing with. Therefore, understanding your competition is an important part of the process.

Just as you would evaluate your business, you must also evaluate your competitors’ businesses. You need to see how well they’ve been doing recently and what mistakes they’ve made in the past couple of months or years.

For publicly-listed companies, financial statements can be a good start. This should help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and enable you to do better than them.

5. Improve your products or services

Once you understand how your competitors have been doing, you can then proceed to work on improving your products or services.

Bear in mind you are supposed to approach this step with an informed mind. So, be mindful of the hits and misses of your competitors while you devise a plan to improve your products or services.

See whether the feature set or the quality of your product needs improvement and allocate the required resources for the task. You should do this under your supervision to ensure that everything is up to the mark. Similarly, train your employees to ensure good service delivery. There are various approaches to go about this, and you can look them up in detail.

6. Invest in marketing

You can’t really steer your business toward growth if you are not serious about marketing. Many businesses allocate marketing responsibilities to existing employees and hope things work out. However, it doesn’t work like that.

You need to have dedicated and qualified resources to approach marketing properly. Marketing is an umbrella term for various processes that lie underneath, so you must first assess which approach you are aiming for.

Once you narrow it down, you must aggressively pursue your strategy with the right resources. Someone qualified in SEO isn’t automatically qualified to be a social media growth manager. Similarly, various strands of marketing need to be dealt with properly. As a business owner, you must invest properly in marketing to reap the desired benefits.

Conclusion

In conclusion, organic growth in business is a vital strategy for sustainable growth and long-term success.  Each step mentioned above should enable you to tap into organic business growth processes.

By focusing on innovation, operational efficiency, enhancing service delivery and customer satisfaction, increasing your company’s digital footprint, expanding your target market, developing your company’s employees, and customer engagement, businesses can achieve organic growth and reap its many benefits.

So, explore these end goals through the points discussed above as you steer your company toward organic business growth.