Entrepreneur Nigel Botterill offers his top tips on how to grow businesses quickly and the secrets of how to run a successful business

Expert: Nigel Botterill

Company: Entrepreneurs Circle

Background: Founder of Entrepreneurs Circle, said to be the largest membership organisation in the UK dedicated to helping businesses grow

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The first leap from an ordinary business to a big income business, comes when the owner goes from being a do-er of his or her own thing to be a marketer of his or her own thing.

It isn’t the products or the services that will get you more customers, it is how you market yourself.

Making most of morning

I am a morning person and at my best and most productive in the morning. I do 90 minutes work, first thing in the morning, on the things that will make my business more successful and better.

If you’re a night owl, more than a morning person, do it in the evening.

Tracking marketing ROI

There’s no excuse for not knowing the return you are getting on every single piece of your marketing spend.

Go to a company who provides call tracking numbers and buy 10-12 of them.

You want a separate number for every place you market your business. You can go online and see which numbers people are calling, so you can see which bits of your marketing are making your phone ring.

Having a website is about getting traffic to it and converting it to either telephone calls or contact information.

Use Google Adwords. On the Google search page, the businesses are not paying to be there, they are only paying when someone clicks on their site – pay per click.

The other way you can get on the front place of Google is get a little red map pin dropped in, with Google places. It’s free, takes five minutes and it gets you on the front page every day.

Utilise your database

It’s not your customer’s job to remember to do business with you. It’s your job to remind them.

There are tools that can set you up for the whole year to regularly contact all your customers. The more you communicate, the more people will come back.

Keep learning skills

The one thing you can do to step change your business is learn from the very best

All I have done is commit to learning stuff and then replicate it.

Most business owners don’t make any commitment at all to learning new stuff. Sure they are up to speed with what’s happening in their industry – but it’s not the doing which makes you successful, it’s the marketing.

Lack of learning and lower level of success are completely linked and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Pictured – Nigel Botterill