Five Strategies to Leverage Executive Skillsets for Business Growth

Roughly 20% of new businesses fail within their first two years of operation, and for many of these companies, the root of their failure is the lack of a solid business growth strategy.

Moving from a permanent executive role to heading your own business often means taking on very different roles and responsibilities. However, there are still areas of overlap where the skillset you’ve developed over the course of your career can be applied to growing your business.

In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at five executive skills and how they can be harnessed for effective business growth.

 

💡 Communication Skills

The soft skill of communication has countless important applications for high-level executives, and business growth is no exception. 

When you’re working to develop your business, good communication can help you forge strong relationships with clients, partners, and investors, fostering a sense of trust that will prove essential for reaching the next stage in your business growth journey.

Whether it’s listening to your client’s needs in a sales capacity or internally communicating cohesive plans for marketing campaigns, ensuring clear communication will support all aspects of your business growth initiatives and keep your broader development strategy moving in the right direction.

Some crucial communication skills all business leaders should practice to foster better development at their companies include:

• Active listening
• Benefits-driven pitching and presentation delivery
• Clear and concise written communication
• Storytelling for persuasion

When honing these elements of communication becomes second nature in all interactions at your business, you’ll be able to remove obstacles to internal projects and streamline collaboration with external parties for more efficient growth.

 

💡 Flexibility and Adaptation

Things are constantly changing in business. While markets shift, new technologies emerge, and customer values pivot, you have to learn to move with these changes to be a successful leader. 

Countless businesses throughout history have failed due to an inability to adapt to change, and learning to remain flexible and leverage opportunities in a timely manner will keep your business in step with the competition and ahead of the curve as your market shifts around you.

If you can hone a flexible mindset as part of your executive skills, you’ll find it easier to seize various opportunities for developing your business, such as:

• Leveraging new and unfamiliar revenue streams, such as white-label reseller hosting, to support your core products and services.
• Being the first to adapt to changes in customer behavior and gaining an edge over the competition.
• Uncovering new approaches to old tasks in order to make processes more efficient and reach business development milestones sooner.

By making flexibility a priority for your executive skill set while still maintaining focus on your overarching goals and milestones, you’ll be able to leverage opportunities with greater initiative and consistency and prevent your business from being too heavily influenced by outside market forces.

 

💡 Research and Analysis

When you’re looking to grow a business, it’s crucial to make calculated decisions based on real, tangible evidence, rather than forming strategies around feelings or assumptions.

With effective research and analysis, you’ll not only form a deeper understanding of your market and customer base, but also put your previous business activities under a microscope and find ways to improve core tasks and processes.

While modern entrepreneurs can use business intelligence platforms and more function-specific tools to highlight useful insights from raw data sets, combining these with your own analytical skills will help you get the most from the relevant data and help you build a more long-term roadmap toward healthy business development.

If, for example, you’re carrying out market research ahead of a product development project, part of your data-gathering activities might include surveying people from your target market to identify sought-after features that competitor products lack. 

If you have the right analytical skills to find emerging trends in customer preferences, you’ll not only be able to make immediate changes to your product that match the current needs of the market but also anticipate future shifts in customer sentiment and better position your brand to meet these needs.

 

💡 Time Management

As you’ve probably heard before, time is your most valuable resource when you’re an entrepreneur. Effective time management will not only ensure that you’re working on the most pressing tasks on your to-do list first but also help you meet deliverables for clients in a timely manner. This will help you build trust in your current customer base and develop a strong reputation that will contribute to attacking new business.

Some effective time management strategies you can leverage to foster growth in your business include:

• Prioritization frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix or ABCDE Method will keep your time and resources focused on the most urgent outstanding tasks.
• Using project management tools to set deadlines and reminders while also tracking your time and identifying time-wasting activities that you can cut to better optimize your schedule.
• Delegating non-core activities to team members or freelancers to free up your own time and avoid burnout.
• Setting firm work-life boundaries to prioritize things like healthy sleep cycles, exercise, and diet to ensure you’re able to perform as efficiently as possible when tackling your day-to-day tasks.

Effective time management can be challenging for executives who are moving into a business leadership role for the first time and suddenly find themselves without a line manager. However, if you develop your prioritization skills and make every hour at work as efficient as possible, you’ll find every step towards your business growth goals far more manageable.

 

💡 Leadership and Team Management

When you’re leveraging skills learned from your executive experience to grow your own business, there’ll be few qualities more important than your ability to lead teams effectively. 

A business’s ability to grow can depend massively on the level of cooperation within the organization, and by being an effective leader, you can help to develop a positive working environment, motivate your team towards excellence, and reach your business growth goals more efficiently.

Some of the activities where great leadership skills can have the biggest impact on your business growth include:

• Hiring and developing employees with unique skill sets or who have proven their ability to view the challenges of your industry through a distinct, forward-thinking perspective will help drive innovation.
• Building stronger teams through encouraging effective collaboration, resolving conflicts, and motivating workers towards common goals for an all-around more efficient organization.
• Leading by example through a strong work ethic and a progressive attitude, inspiring your employees to give each task their all and help the business towards its next big milestone.

While effective leadership and team management may not have the most immediately obvious effect on your business growth, developing your team’s effectiveness will always produce smaller, positive impacts that will permeate through all your activities and encourage a healthy rate of development.

 

Leveraging Opportunities for Business Growth

Whatever your career background up to this point, a well-rounded executive skillset will provide plenty of opportunities for channeling your expertise into a robust business development strategy, and pushing your brand to achieve its full potential.

We hope these pointers have helped contextualize your skills as a business leader and given you some exciting ideas for the next steps in your business development plan.