One sure way to put more zeros at the end of your bank account balance is to Pumpkin Plan your business. It’s no secret that starting your own business puts you in the driver’s seat and can drastically increase the amount of money your make. But what’s not widely known is how to take a small business to something big. One sure way to do it is to Pumpkin Plan your business.
Author Mike Michalowicz wrote a great book on how to do just that. Mike was able to find a parallel between growing the biggest pumpkin and growing a big business. He breaks it down for us in his book titled, The Pumpkin Plan. Let’s look at the parallels he found and what he recommends to grow your business…
How to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin
1. Plant promising seeds.
2. Water, water, water.
3. As they grow, routinely remove all of the diseased or damaged pumpkins.
4. Weed like a mad dog. If it’s not a pumpkin plant, remove it.
5. Identify the stronger, faster-growing pumpkins. Remove all the less-promising pumpkins. Repeat until you have one pumpkin on each vine.
6. Focus all of your attention on the big pumpkin. Nurture it like a baby.
7. Watch it grow.
How to Grow a Big Business
1. Identify and leverage your biggest natural strengths.
2. Sell, sell, sell.
3. As your business grows, fire all of your small-time, rotten clients.
4. Never let distractions–often labeled as new opportunities–take hold. Weed them out fast.
5. Identify your top clients and remove the rest of your less-promising clients.
6. Focus all your attention on your top clients. Nurture and protect them. Find out what they want more than anything, and if it aligns with your strengths, give it to them. Then replicate this service for as many of the top clients as you can.
7. Watch your company grow to a giant size.
One Core Principle
This approach to building a big business has one core principle: Find what you’re good at and double down on that. You need to figure out where your strengths are and then put all of our efforts into providing to customers a service based on your strengths. It’s also a good idea to find your ideal customers, as the wrong customer can really drain you. Find your strength and ideal customer, and then put everything into what that customer wants. Once you’re happy with what you have, find other customers and sell your service to them too.
The Takeaway
There are many articles out there that will tell you how to grow your business. You can find many HowTo guides for just building a big business. Of all I’ve seen, this is one of the simplest ones to follow. The analogy is perfect and is a simple way to explain how to grow a big business. One thing I really love about The Pumpkin Plan is its simplistic nature. Too many times we tend to believe that we need a big, innovative solution to solve complex problems. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, all we need is a simple solution that gets us 80% of the way there. We can figure the rest out later.
If you want to read this great book by Mike Michalowicz, pick it up via my affiliate link here:
