What made my business grow? Me.

Leonie Westenberg
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

I ran a successful education business for ten years. I gave up running the business when it no longer fit with who I had become. But the one thing that made my business grow, when others in the area had failed in the past, was ME.

My service. My passion. My smile. My willingness to listen. My flexibility. My awareness of customer needs, and my awareness of boundaries. My organisation skills. My ability to inspire staff. My ability to communicate.

And, most of all, my ability to care.

Organisation methods, staff management, how to run open days and information evenings, social media marketing skills…all these can be learned.

Having a quality product that you believe in is essential and can be researched.

But caring, really caring about the clients and their needs, and being passionate about working together in service and towards a solution..that can’t be learned or researched or faked.

You have to care. You have to be passionate. Your customers can sense your authenticity. They can smell a fake a mile away.

In the end, being real included my willingness to adapt to new situations. It also meant that I didn’t make wild promises but, instead, communicated clearly what it was that I and my centre (my business) could achieve in collaboration with the prospective client.

And then I delivered. I worked hard. I did what I promised…and a little bit more.

This built my reputation.

In the end, word of mouth became my biggest source of new clients. People shared their successful outcomes from my centre and business. New clients came through the recommendations of others.

And it was all built on me — on who I was, and what I believed, and on my willingness to help others.

There are no three easy steps to business growth. There are skills to be learned, through reading and time and training.

But, in the end, business growth comes down to you. You, the entrepreneur, who is passionate about the product and service and who cares about the client.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein — try not to become a person of success but, rather, try to become a person of value.

Who you are and what you value shines through your product, your service, and your business.

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