5 Ways to Grow Your Business
Image credit: © Domestika
With Erica Wolfe-Murray, founder of Lola Media
Growing your business takes focus, persistence and imagination. Erica Wolfe-Murray, founder of Lola Media has a wealth of knowledge and experience with previous clients including Disney and National Geographic. She has helped numerous companies across the cultural, creative and tech sectors with everything from exploring new business models to maximising intellectual property assets. Here are her key tips to work through when growing your business:
1. Interrogate your past, background and experience to shape a unique business
Don’t be a ‘me too’ business. Your life up to now is totally unique so use it to create a business based on this uniqueness. Interrogate your childhood, background, your past client knowledge, what you have ever been paid to do to to understand exactly what unique assets/knowledge sets you bring to the table. Grow your business out of these - no-one else will ever have the same as you. It sets you totally apart from the competition.
2. Ensure you retain as much IP (intellectual property) as you can
Many creative businesses are built on a service model - it’s a bit like being a hamster on a never-ending wheel. By building your own intellectual property, you can devise different ways of harnessing it, licensing it and earning a variety of revenue streams from it. Every business is capable of doing this - without exception.
3. Don’t abdicate from managing the money
Many creative business owners say ‘I’m creative, I don’t do money’ - I have no time for this attitude. If it’s your business, you need to ‘do money’. It’s not hard. You need to earn more than you spend. Period. Use your inventiveness to create new business models or ways of earning revenues as this can boost your growth substantially. No-one will nurture the money in your business as well as you.
4. Think through the 5 areas of opportunity imaginatively
There are 5 areas of opportunity for your business. By taking a imaginative approach to each one - whether through marketing, contracts, new ways of charging, new product or service offers - you can grow your business in rich ways. The 5 areas are a) past/present clients, b) future clients, c) competitors, d) new buyers and e) new audiences. Each one needs its own strategy to unlock the potential rewards.
5. Don’t assume ‘growth’ means getting bigger…
To most people ‘growing a business’ infers taking on more staff etc. Don’t fall into this trap. ‘Growth’ can mean same turnover but higher profit, or growth in reputation bringing in fewer but higher value clients, or growth in additional revenue streams ensuring your business is more secure if one market suffers a downturn. Work out what growth looks like for you and your business and focus on that.
Erica Wolfe-Murray
Founder of Lola Media, Erica Wolfe-Murray has helped almost 400 companies across the creative, cultural and tech sector to grow through inventive use of their existing intellectual assets and IP over the last 10 years. Ranging from production companies to poets, dance schools to software developers, museums to fintech apps, she has a unique ability to see growth potential, new revenues, products, services and audiences in every business. Her background in advertising, design, licensing, pr and tv production, includes roles as a creative head and financial director. She is currently leading the BFI/National Lottery-funded Female Founders Scale-up Programme for Creative England for the second year, combining high-level workshops with intensive 1-2-1 business coaching.
Erica’s book ’Simple Tips, Smart Ideas: Build a Bigger Better Business’ was a finalist in the 2020 Business Book Awards.
Her new course ‘IP for Creative Entrepreneurs’ is now available on Domestika, the world’s biggest online platform for creatives.