13 leaders share their top growth hacks for businesses

Building meaningful relationships is one that I'm shocked to say I think is underrated. Especially with how easy it is to connect with people today, I still see people focusing on numbers of social media followers/connections instead of forming actually constructive relationships with 5-10 people who could help them and their business.

#2 "Allow Yourself to Fail" really resonates with me. So much of what you do for start-ups is trial and error. Even when something doesn't work well, I try to keep the perspective that it was still worth it if I learned from it!

Not really hacks, but principles we've known for a long time.

A "hack" is something not many people know.

Talking about growth, I think the biggest "hack" (not many people are aware of how well it works) is to take a tactic and execute it consistently. Sticking with something (even if a tactic is weak) works wonders.

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Nice — this is a great list to have.

I really like the journaling exercise and I've been doing that for about a month now. It was hard to start this habit but I'm on a roll now and don't want to stop. This also feeds into their recommendation of reminding yourself of your goals and what's important to you as a professional and as a person.

As they mention:

6. Record Your Successes and Failures — It's hard to know what you've done until you read what you do. Journaling my achievements and failures and frequently reviewing them is a great growth hack. Reviewing my failures motivates me to work harder and most importantly smarter than before. Reviewing my accomplishments helps me to know when and how to reward myself. It also helps to track my progress and deter unwise decisions.

Thoughtful post and it sure helps in growing the organization and increase in revenue

A lot of these are no brainers but don’t provide enough context to be useful. Like hire highly skilled people who don’t have big egos. Yes, great idea, but how does one go about finding these people? Or knowing you’ve found one when you have?

For me the only useful reminder here is the daily journal reminder. I’ve found practices like this helpful in the past and have friends who have been very, very successful and say their secret weapon is journaling.

"Record Your Successes and Failures"

I think not many people realized how important it is to track your progress. And it doesn't always have to be the good ones. This will serve as a lesson for you to continue or to stop a specific set of actions, and will encourage you to go on, especially when you're on the right track.

Some of these (like LinkedIn lead generation) are not one-size-fits-all, so keep that in mind.

Reminding yourself of your goals and why you're doing what you're doing is a great one for just about everyone though. I like that one of the entrepreneurs said they schedule 20 minutes on the first of each month to do this. I might copy that. Because I personally get so in the weeds sometimes that it's a struggle to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

Time boxing is a good one, but 30 minutes never worked for me. I guess it depends on what you're working on, but I mean 30 minutes...I was just getting started by the time the alarm went off.

I don't have employees and/or a team yet. But I imagine the "Give your people room to fail" is a hard thing to do as a founder. I mean, failing yourself is a tough thing to embrace. But giving someone else permission to fail has to be waaay harder. I find it difficult to delegate/trust other people to take care of certain things (from times I've hired freelancers) - If I'm paying someone for a service I expect it to be good. Embracing other people's failures is something I'd find really hard to do (as much as I can see why it makes sense).