Cutting to grow can be quite a helpful strategy to some business owners; but we’re also all quite sure that a good number of entrepreneurs would also disagree. However, as a personal experience, I would say that the cut-to-grow strategy has greatly helped me out.
I’ve spent the last few months re-evaluating my business. Given the current situation, I was now almost four hundred thousand dollars short of what I initially had. Like with many starting entrepreneurs, I thought I could do everything all at once and I expected to do all of them very well. However, this was not the case. I was entirely wrong.
Realizing the mistake, I strategized on how to proceed with my business to make up for the lost time and money. This is when I decided to employ a cut-to-grow strategy. But contrary to the common definition of the term, I mean cut-to-grow in a different manner.
Decide on What to Cut
I started my business with the thought of launching four products. To begin with, I didn’t even have one product launched yet. During that time, I had no idea why I thought that launching four products all at the same time would be a great idea. For me, it just seemed reasonable. So, I started out with four products when it would’ve been better to just launch with one. Lesson learned: learning to cut right from the start is an important consideration for your business.

Decide on What to Cut Online

Social media marketing has been the craze these days. With the advent of free marketing tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and blog sites, reaching out to more people has never been easier. Though these tools have their benefits, always assess if these tools actually helping you out. Is spending two hours a day writing blog posts or tweets getting you your expected responses compared to only writing once per week? In my case, I found out that posting weekly is generating the same results as posting daily; therefore, I used that two hours daily doing something else more productive for my business.

Decide on other things that you can Cut

Is your participation in a lot of volunteer committees eating up some time? Are these committees also helping you out? Another question is, “How many hours do you spend watching TV daily?” It is great to have these activities to unwind; but you must also ask yourself if the time spent on these can be better spent on your personal fitness and health or your company’s growth. Look for other things, especially the ones that are non-productive, that are taking up your time and try cutting down on them.

Another change that I had was that I gave up my office and went back to working in coffee shops until I get things back to their usual way. I was looking for other ways on how to still continue supporting my business in the short-term, with very minimal impact on the long-run. Giving up the office was a big decision.
People usually relate cutting-to-grow as a way of cutting down on valuable resources. As a personal belief, this is not right. You can find other things that you can cut down on. Cutting down on unnecessary things will ultimately help you in expanding, instead of downsizing, your business.