During my time mentoring new businesses going through the start up phase, a common request (or more accurately, complaint!) is that they want to get more customers. Don’t we all? Without them, our business falls flat and quickly starts writing cheques it can’t pay for. We may be in a business that we are passionate about, but we need to pay the bills too.

You may be experiencing a low point in the year if you are a seasonal business – Santa doesn’t work all year round, but he has a busy time of the year that makes up for the rest of the months in the calendar. Perhaps your business is the same? In that case, you could be appreciative of some down time to catch up on essential reviewing, diagnostics, planning, scheduling, or brushing up on some training and so forth.

For businesses who are more than a year old, its useful to look back on what you did this time last year, and continue to do so – never throw out the old calendar or diary, its entries are pure gold! Remember that event you did a just over a year ago and wasn’t as organised as you’d wished? This is your second chance to get it right – so book back in, and learn from your inexperience. This time around you’ll smash it!

So – how to get them? Million dollar question! Some suggestions could be to introduce incentives, upsell to your existing customer base, review some more advertising placements- either a repeat of whats worked previously or to test a new approach.

It may also be an opportunity – strange thing to say? Perhaps you need to change your business offering, by revisiting some work you’ve done around who your ideal client is and what they’re looking for. Does your current offering match up to their requirements?

One answer that many shied away from is to look at a competitor that’s doing well. what can you learn from them? well, plenty. Whilst I am not suggesting you copy a competitor in your industry – after all, who knows if their efforts are paying off? You could end up making the same expensive mistakes as they did – you can learn from their approaches and strategies. Look into what they seem to be doing well at and why, especially if you share the same target audience. This is also the same for similar industries, where a cross over in market occurs.