I think a large proportion of the inquiries I receive as a business mentor relate to the subject of growth. While this can encroach on many different sides of a corporate, the potential client is often talking about new, additional and continuous long-term sales.

Guy Kawasaki is a well-known sales guru. Only this week, I recommended to a client one of his first books ‘How to drive your competition crazy’. This week he was featured in a blog ‘6 tips for growing your business’. I particularly liked the concept of ensuring that your are able to tell your customers a compelling story, as well as securing key recommendations for your service / products.

Most important for me is the suggestion that you must ‘position yourself against a market leader’. This forces you to improve all the time. And thus you can claim with certainty that you are as good as the best.

To illustrate the centrality of this point, let me give you a comparison. A couple of years ago, my daughter was training for an important job near Jerusalem, Israel. This involved several physical challenges, including a 2km run. Try as she might, she could not complete the distance within the set target time. She (and others) were given one last opportunity, which was when she decided that she would run along side the best in the group…and stay with them whatever it took.

Needless to say, my daughter passed the test. In fact, her time was so good that she was asked to do the run again the next day to prove that ‘nothing suspect’ had occurred. In commercial terms, that demand is called a “repeat order”. And that means a new, happy customer, who appreciates that they do not have to go to the biggest in order to obtain the best.

Welcome to the world of a growing business!