How To Grow A Business Organically

Creating a successful organisation involves focusing on your business growth.

Growth can help increase drive and help you reach your business objectives. Essentially, you’ll need to lay out effective growth-building strategies if you want your business to do well. 

Organic growth strategies can help you grow your business, but what is organic business growth and how do you grow a business organically? 

There are two types of growth: organic and inorganic.

Organic growth involves an intricate mix of experience, skill, reputation, visibility, and aptitude. Businesses that grow organically use internal resources without help from other companies, like developing new products or increasing sales. 

Inorganic growth is typically simple, relating to resources, liabilities, and funds. This is obtained growth related to mergers and acquisitions - the takeover of other companies. Examples include joint partnerships or opening new branches. 

Achieving organic growth takes more time compared to inorganic growth, but it’s usually more sustainable and can help companies achieve success over the long term. 

If you’re wondering how to grow a business organically, you’ll need to adopt strategies that drive natural growth, using your company’s own abilities and resources. Examples include growing your customer base, forming new business models, and creating new product lines. 

We’ll cover more about how to grow a business organically in this post, including the differences between organic growth and inorganic growth and organic growth in practice. 

What Is Organic Business Growth?

Organic growth relates to business growth driven by a company’s internal resources. The growth occurs when the company receives more business from current clients or expands its product market fit to receive new clients.

In essence, organic growth is about growing a business from the inside using assets you own, such as knowledge, connections, experience, and skills. Organic growth is a sign of a dedicated commitment to expanding an organization. 

Benefits of Organic Business Growth

Organic growth is ideal as it drives business growth without needing to access additional resources to increase customers, sales, and production. 

It takes a while to increase profit and revenue solely through internal resources. There’s a risk of rapidly developing competitors moving past you in a short period. Despite this, organic growth is typically more valuable in the long term and has several significant advantages. 

The benefits of organic business growth include:

1. Influences Economic Health

Organic business growth ensures you only spend on what is necessary. 

Lowering costs after audits can directly influence operations, ensuring you assign important resources to fields that may generate better returns. 

This helps lower risk and prevent debt, as your investments go towards sound, forseeable outcomes and efforts. 

2. Greater Control

Organic growth methods don’t involve third parties, so business owners have complete control over important brand and company decisions. 

It’s also easier to make quick, turn-around changes, creating a flexible business model. 

3. Boosts New Customers

Organic business growth enhances all areas of your company, drawing in new clients from diverse markets and backgrounds. 

This can improve proceeds as you cater to a wider range of people, maximising new growth and revenue sources. 

Organic Growth In Practice

Both organic growth and inorganic growth can result in revenue, but in practice, companies that have relied more on organic growth strategies have outperformed mergers and acquisition-focused counterparts.

Analysis from McKinsey & Company looked at 550 European and US companies over 15 years and found that organic growers, at all revenue growth stages, produced greater excess Total Shareholder Returns compared to companies relying more on acquisitions. 

There are endless examples of how organic growth happens across various industries. A well-known instance is how Amazon has grown its business by entering new markets.

Amazon officially opened as an online bookseller in 1994. Since then, the company has moved beyond its origins to cover an extensive range of products and services, including entering new markets, like logistics and healthcare. 

Another example is how Nike has organically grown its business by creating a strong brand identity around their ‘Just Do It’ slogan. The campaign had a great effect on Nike’s success, increasing their sales from $877 million to $9.2 billion between 1988 and 1998. 

Through nurturing core strengths and constantly adapting to market demands, companies that prioritise organic growth can achieve long-term stability and profitability. 

How To Grow A Business Organically: A Guide

Now that you know more about organic growth and inorganic growth, here are some steps you can implement to grow your business organically. 

1. Research Your Target Audience

According to Investopedia, market research is essential for developing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. No one product will appeal to every consumer, so strong market research programs can help determine key demographics that are more likely to use said product.

Without proper market research, businesses will have to rely on anecdotal evidence to make important choices, which may not be accurate. If you do not carry out efficient research into your target audience, you won’t understand who your target clients are or how they make purchasing decisions. 

You should treat market research as a constant activity, always learning about your organization’s setting and your customers, including their requirements and preferences. 

Create detailed profiles that reflect your ideal client base. Review buyer history, form focus groups, obtain feedback, and research your competitors. 

After you’ve determined your target customer’s preferences through market research, you can begin developing valuable services and creating a powerful marketing plan. 

If you do not research your target audience, you won’t understand who your target clients are or how they make purchasing decisions. 

2. Stand Out From The Crowd

Analysis from Kantar found that there was a strong connection between increasing brand uniqueness and consumer willingness to pay more for a brand. Companies with unique differentiators can easily explain their value to potential clients, standing out against the competition and receiving more business, driving organic growth. 

A distinct brand can discern itself against competitors through unique services, products, benefits, or features. This helps companies create a singular brand identity which emphasises the value customers can receive only from that business, which can boost profits and market share. 

Companies from particular niches or are highly specialised are examples of this, as they have differentiators. These are benefits or features that make your business stand out from the competition. 

To increase organic growth, brand differentiators need to be factual, provable, and relevant to your target market. 

Brand messaging should deliver demonstrable evidence of the value consumers may receive from a brand’s services or products. The messaging may also display how a business’s proficiency resolves clients’ issues, or features that make its products the ideal solution for their problems. 

Companies with unique differentiators can easily explain their value to potential clients, standing out against the competition and receiving more business. 

3. Create New Offerings

Creating new business models, products, or services is another strategy that can increase organic business growth. The information received from client research can help determine differences in client expectations and consumer groups that use the business’s products. 

This information is useful in developing business ideas to design better products and services. These tackle the unique requirements of particular market segments, which increase revenue and the number of buyers. 

You might promote a new product that targets a particular market demographic you haven’t covered yet, or make changes to an old service and re-introduce it to your client base, increasing market share in the process. 

In the case of fresh business models, advances in consumer behaviour and technology lead to additional methods that serve the business market. 

For example, Netflix began in 1997, when they sent DVDs to their clients through mail. In 2001, CEO Reed Hastings came up with the idea of streaming movies through the internet, straight to our at-home screens. The rest is history - it’s hard to imagine a world without streaming video on demand! 

Aim to create or detect new business models that meet emerging demands to remain ahead of the competition. This can help businesses achieve organic growth through innovation, attracting new customers to grow their client base. 

The information received from client research can help determine differences in client expectations and consumer groups that use the business’s products. 

4. Implement Organisational Changes

Internal organisation changes can help improve organic growth. Harvard Business School states that organisational changes help companies remain competitive in a fast-changing global economy where evolution is imperative for success. 

Essentially, business environments are always growing and changing, so organisations should make changes to keep up and succeed. 

Assess your business performance metrics and operations with the following questions:

• Would the business benefit from transferring client and employee texts to a single location?
• Are you using email or landlines to communicate with employees and customers, instead of texts or VOIP systems?
• Do employees look into customer history before supporting them?
• Is time wasted in non-essential meetings that could be used elsewhere? 

Remember that organisational changes can be very time-consuming for business leaders and staff. 

According to Gartner, only 34% of change initiatives pursued by businesses led to success, while an additional 16% received mixed results. Organisational changes can create disorder and generally takes time before the changes pay off. 

Assess your business aims and timeline before you choose to make organisational changes, or you decide to concentrate on short-term growth. 

If your main goal is long-term organic growth, organisational changes can help you grow your business organically over an extended period. However, if you’re focusing on short-term business growth, it’s best to prioritise and encourage supporting work from multi-functional teams. 

Assess your business aims and timeline before you choose to make organisational changes, or if you decide to concentrate on short-term growth. 

There you go! Now you know more about how to grow a business organically. We hope this post has helped you understand more about organic business growth, including why organic growth is important for organisational success. 

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Written by Rosh for Tramshed Tech.