The Small Business Life Cycle: The No-Fluff Guide to Navigating the Five Stages of Small Business Growth

Stage 0 Summary

Bootstrapped businesses have a huge advantage of being customer-focused out of necessity, but at the same time their growth comes from what they pull in—and a growing business is a hungry business. So much of the early stage resources are put into the day-to-day hustle that there’s rarely any left over for strategic investments in the people, proce

Stage 1 Summary

They “learn” how to do it, they assemble all of the right ingredients, and many months or years later, they’re exhausted but unwilling to give up. Their struggles are often just a result of their not working on the right things at the right time—the avocado that is their business, market, product, or team just isn’t ripe yet.

Start noticing what things make you come alive.

A healthy mix of supporting and complementary offers will allow you to best serve your market at the same time that it positively affects the average lifetime value of your customers.

Each new solution that your business develops should be at least as profitable as the last solution you developed. The exception is if this new solution is primarily meant to acquire new customers that you can sell a more profitable solution to down the road. Just be sure you make that link so the

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” —Peter Drucker

There’s another huge upshot of developing simple, doable solutions: your customers get quick and early wins. If they get quick wins, they’re more likely to stick with your business as it grows because they’ve had a positive experience.