How you grow your company can be as important as whether you grow your company.  To avoid potential pitfalls, consider these tips to successful growth:

1.  Find your key focus. It is important to select and stick to a key focus, particularly in times of an uncertain or slow economy.

“Go back to what your firm is good at, and do the things that can be delivered consistently and successfully,” said Aldonna R. Ambler, of AMBLER Growth Strategy Consultants, Inc.  ”it will be harder to add new services or venture too far outside your scope during a recession.”

2.  Don’t become overconfident. Like a favored team that lets down its guard and loses to an underdog, an attitude of overconfidence can bring about business loss.

“The company’s high rate of growth is effectively the realization of the founder’s original dream, so many times he or she develops a dangerous sense of omnipotence,” said Ian MacDougall, founder and professional director of Corporate Lifecycles, LLC.  Overconfidence is unrealistic and can spell disaster.

3.  Don’t define your business by your product. Virtually any product can become obsolete over time.

Therefore, MacDougall recommends that you not define your business by your product, but rather from you customer’s perspective of the needs that you satisfy.

“For example, you’re not in the paint business – you’re in the aesthetic protection business,” MacDougall said.

4.  Make your marketing message consistent. If you want to grow your company, marketing is essential, and how you market is important.

“A key way to grow your business is to have an insistent, persistent, consistent marketing message,” Ambler said.  ”In today’s complicated, preoccupied world, marketing messages have to be very simple, very direct and constant.”

5.  Practice what you promise. “Your customers will be the most intolerant of mistakes when money is tight and time is tight,” Ambler says.  For example, if your marketing campaign promises a certain turnaround time, then your practice needs to live up to that promise.  Otherwise, you risk diminished customer satisfaction or possibly losing customers.

Although business growth carries with it a certain amount of risk, attention to these areas can help make your company’s growth successful.