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Growing your business can be a difficult and often frustrating process. No matter how talented, experienced, or proficient you are as a leader, business development may not be one of your core skills.  So how do you develop the business leadership skills necessary to grow the business and achieve success?  You need a growth strategy.  Here are some ideas:

• Leveraging. Every leader should be looking for ways to leverage everything they do in multiple ways.
• Relationship-building.  Relationships are key to growth. You must build high trust relationships with everyone – clients, vendors, colleagues, alliances – absolutely everyone who deals with your business in any way, shape or form.
• Clarity.  A key business leadership skill is clarity – clarity about who your company is and what you want to accomplish, clarity around job functions and performance metrics, your ethics, and a multitude of other factors that will impact performance and growth.
• Infrastructure. Your infrastructure will include budgets and planning at a minimum. Many leaders overlook this critically important aspect of doing business. How do you know where you are going if you don’t plan for it?

When we think of business leadership skills we often ignore a critical one: growing the business. Everyone is responsible for business development, not just those in sales. If you know the challenges that keep your clients up at night, all that remains is to provide your clients with solutions that will work for them. That is, after all, what a growth strategy is.