Growth through acquisition has tremendous advantages for small and medium businesses. Most of the time, we only hear about big companies buying out other big companies, but this is also a viable option for smaller or newer businesses for expanding market share and rapid growth. Acquiring your competitors lowers your competition and immediately increases market domination, often putting upward mobility on pricing and profit margins. Business owners should assess whether Acquiring other companies is viable,, but don’t rule out acquisitions just because you’re a small company.

How to Compare Organic Growth with Growth by Acquisition 

Normal business growth or “organic growth” is the most natural way to grow your business and offers familiarity and comfort zone status. There is a sense of accomplishment from building your company from the ground up with your team efforts. This doesn’t mean you won't have any setbacks or stress from failure or even success. But organic growth always will be the good old fashioned way to grow with both hands on the wheel.

Organic growth, although stable and controllable, can also be prolonged. Market evolution can take years for your business to even afford to expand to a new location or geographic area. Opening the third location may be faster than a second but still takes time and effort to execute. This isn’t a solid rule, though. There are plenty of businesses that get big and dominate more rapidly than others. And sometimes businesses explode and end up going more extensive than they can handle and dying out before they can reap the rewards of their expansion.

Pros and Cons of Strategic Acquisition 

Strategic acquisition takes lots of thought and planning, but is faster than slow and steady organic growth. If done correctly, a merger or purchase can show instant benefits to your business that can help make rapid growth sustainable. Growth through acquisition can be fast, and sometimes even less risky than average organic growth. The competitive advantages are also formidable, from catching your competition off guard to instant market penetration. Your pace of growth likely increases as you eliminate competitors in your market.

Growth through acquisition, although rapid, can bring its own set of problems. Immediately after a merge, there can often be internal management problems that need to be faced and can hinder rapid growth from the recent acquisition. If you have to reorganize the workforce in one or both companies, you may have employees harboring stress or bad feelings about merging, creating a less than efficient workplace.

Knowing What’s Right for You 

As a business owner, making decisions as big as strategic acquisition can be very hard, especially when your decision can decide the company’s fate. How do you know what growth strategy is right for your business? Your answer should be based on your business’s unique circumstances. In both instances, you will need extensive planning to ensure that the growth you are looking for is both attainable and maintainable to justify the expense and effort. It’s best to explore both options for your company and work through the setbacks both would bring to the table. Decide whether the option you want to take will help or hinder your goals. Once you have made your decision, move forward and execute your plan decisively.

How VC Strategic Can Help 

VC Strategic is a business acquisition and consolidation expert. We can take care of all the little things inside and out. When considering what decisions are right for your business, look to our team of experts to help guide you to booming success. We can help you craft a growth plan to provide the best profits for your business or company. At VC Strategic, our mission is to help 8-figure diggers strike gold through strategic execution.

Managing several marketing relationships can get frustrating, fast. A lot of businesses will hire different companies to manage PPC advertising, SEO, video, social media, website development, and content creation. Meanwhile, others will turn to a full-service marketing agency.

Telling your value proposition, repeating your ROI demands, and communicating your brand over and over again is as exhaustive as it is inefficient. Meanwhile, hiring a full-service marketing agency AKA "one-stop-shop" can be daunting. Can they balance everything; can they lead the charge; do they have the expertise in each area? It’s hard to know what to look for in regards to what services should be provided, what you’d like them to handle, and how to integrate them into your current marketing team or plans.  Hiring an agency that employs professionals with comprehensive expertise across all marketing vehicles is critical to maximizing marketing ROI, time, and energy which business owners consistently invest in growth and marketing efforts. Getting this partnership right is one of the highest ROI growth decisions you will ever make and will ensure that your agency can successfully handle all of your marketing, advertising, branding, and other promotional needs as they arise. 

What should a scope look like for a full-service marketing agency?

Full-service marketing agencies have the ability to handle your marketing needs from top to bottom. As an agency learns about your company they can tailor services and packages specifically designed to meet your business goals, maximize your budget, and grow your brand. Many of the common services included with full-service agencies are:

• Strategic Direction
• Market Share/SWOT Assessment 
• Web Development
• Content Creation and SEO 
• Paid Advertising 
• Social Media Management
• Email Marketing 
• Branding and Design 
• Video Creation 

Hiring a full-service marketing agency helps businesses build strategies that will drive maximum ROI on their marketing investment.

How do I vet a full-service marketing agency?

There are many reasons to hire a full-service marketing agency that you should consider when deciding how to market your business. Here are three things to consider when making the decision to hire a marketing agency. 

1. Cost-Effectiveness: Hiring in-house can be very expensive when you take into account the overhead of salary, training, tools, and equipment that will be necessary. Agencies like VC Strategic offer developed professional strategies and experienced marketers to implement them. The right agency will analyze your business and tailor its services to fit your budget, needs, and goals.  
2. Expertise: Many times a full-service marketing agency will have a team of employees who are not only experts at paid advertising, content writing, SEO, and graphic design, but they will also have years of experience working inside and outside your particular niche. Allowing them to draw on that knowledge to help build specific strategies to help you achieve your business goals. 
3. Cohesiveness: Hiring multiple agencies for different aspects of your business has been a strategy employed heavily in the past. Hiring specific firms to tackle specific tasks. The obvious downside to this is that it can end up fracturing your message and leaving your campaign inconsistent. Not to mention the communication lag that accompanies outsourcing to multiple agencies. When you hire a full-service marketing agency, you can be assured that not only will your message stay consistent, but you won’t have the frustrating experience of trying to organize and communicate separate pieces of your strategy across multiple companies. Remember the game “telephone” as a kid? It’s like that - but much more expensive.

How do I Know What Agency is Best For Me? 

The first, and most important, step to finding a suitable full-service marketing agency for your business is to acknowledge your goals and objectives. Picking a full-service marketing team is a crucial decision in the future of your company. A few things to consider when you are making a decision about hiring an agency:

• Make sure you have a clear vision of the future of your company. Knowing your goals and intentions will help the company meet your expectations. Do you have a blueprint for the next steps?  
• Understand the experience that each agency brings to the table in regards to your industry. Research the agency's previous clientele and success in previous campaigns. 
• Make sure the agency presents a clear and cohesive proposal or strategy to help your business succeed. The strength of all agencies is in the strategy.  
• Get a clear picture of where the agency’s experience lies. Track records in your industry are critical. 

This is why SEO matters to your business's success. Now, it's time to face the stone-cold facts. 

• 93% of all website traffic is generated by Google™
• 46% of all Google searches are local
• Less than 15% of all Google searches actually end up clicking on a paid ad.
• The top three positions on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) account for over 62% of clicks. 

OK, before we go any further, look at those four statistics again. Those four facts alone should be enough to make anyone (or any business) give a long hard look at how well optimized their SEO is on their site. 

Still not sure? Let's play this out. 

Let's say 100 different people search keywords that directly relate to your business's products or services. We will say 15% of those people do in fact click on a well-crafted Google Ad. That leaves us with 85 potential customers, and according to studies 34% of those are clicking on position 1, that's 29 people (28.9 really, but we are rounding up) and 42% are clicking on positions 2 through 5, that's another 36 people. That only leaves 20 of the original 85 left for positions 6-10 and beyond. 

Showing up in the SERP results and showing up high is critical. 

For those of you who are visual here is a nifty table created by Sixtrix to help out: 

OK, back to the facts. 

• 2021 is expected to see nearly 211 million Americans using mobile search (is your website optimized for the mobile experience?).
• SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media. 
• Only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication.

That last fact listed is why so many businesses don't give the proper time and attention to their SEO. Ranking a page and ranking it well is hard work. But with the right plan, techniques, and execution it is possible. 

Understanding where your low hanging fruits lie, what type of content needs to be produced, what keyword opportunities exist, and what to do after you hit "publish" is crucial to improving your organic rankings and hereinafter your traffic, sales, and revenue.  

This is exactly what VC Strategic can provide you. A tried and true method for improving your sites organic viability. There are no shortcuts or magic wands to wave, just fundamental techniques and perseverance. 

Increasing your organic relevance is a time-consuming but worthwhile task, and not having the proper time or knowledge base to perform the necessary steps is a real challenge for many businesses. If improving your organic SEO is something you are considering, click here to book a free consultation today and we will create a custom SEO roadmap to help you and your business achieve your goals.

Living in a world ruled by a pandemic is not easy. We are all adapting to changes in our environment, our lifestyles, and our businesses. Some are panicking while others are buried in the sand, mix in media bias, and it can be hard to figure out what to believe! Feeling the same way, we dug to find the best non-media biased COVID data out there. Keep reading to find out more— and, trust us, some of these will shock you. 

Home Prices Are Skyrocketing

In August, the pandemic’s hights, we saw a surprising rise in home sales and cost. The median price of an existing home in the United States rose to $310,600 in August* and is up 11.4% compared to a year ago (2019). Also, in August, home sales are up 10.5% from just a year ago. COVID-19 is impacting lifestyles, but it is definitely not hurting the home market.

Pro forma statements have to be based upon reliable and realistic information in order to create an accurate picture of your financial standing. As your company grows, these pro forma statements should be updated monthly and annually. Pro forma statements should be designed to grow with your business; as you change, so do they!

GDP Dropped It Like It’s Hot

This year (2020), the effects of the pandemic on sales were palpable. In the last few weeks of the first quarter, we saw a five percent decline in the annual gross domestic product (GDP). Forward to the second quarter, and we saw the largest drop for any quarter since the Great Depression: 31.7%. This was the most intense economic contraction that some have seen in their lifetime. The bright side of this is that this macro-level data can help you make your business’s strategic decisions.

Economic Hot Potato

We are beginning to see hints of financial upturns in the third quarter, but we are still years away from a full economic recoup. This economic surge could be attributed to the growing pains of a new pandemic “normal.” In the third quarter, we saw many businesses returning from a total shutdown, adjusting to socially distant production and construction, live events being on hold, and maintaining a business at half-occupancy. We also saw many businesses not return to the economy at all.

Plummeting Interest Rates

One silver lining to the new pandemic panic is that you are getting a break! Interest rates are expected to stay low for years. The Federal Reserve’s latest economic forecast suggests that low interest rates are here to stay through 2023. This could mean that this is your sign to refinance your debt or strategize your business financing.

More Non-Biased Media COVID Data?

Here are the most helpful charts we’ve seen on non-media biased COVID data.

Key Takeaways: 

• As of the end of August 2020, there have been 163,735 business closures throughout the United States.
• A recent CDC study that looked at more than 80,000 U.S. adults hospitalized with flu over eight flu seasons (2010-11 through 2017-18) found that sudden, serious heart complications were common and occurred in 1 out of every eight patients.