Small business growth hack: How to grow your business without breaking the bank.

Updatd February 2026

Whether you’re starting a new business or are a small business owner focused on growing your business, you face a constant cycle of challenges and opportunities. At times, the sheer volume of needs can seem insurmountable, especially with limited resources. But there is a business hack that can help you overcome obstacles and boost your productivity. It’s called project-based internships.

By turning your needs into fully-scoped, stackable projects and finding talented student interns who can address them, you’ll be able to meet your business growth needs within your budget. In this blog, we’ll share how you can get started today.

Step 1: Determine your challenges or opportunities for growth.

The first step in growing your business is to ask yourself some key questions:

• Where do I want my business to be in 5 years?
• What do we need to do to get there?
• What critical projects keep getting put aside?

Using the above prompts, write down the challenge or opportunity that you would like to focus on to help your small business grow. For example, you might own a health food store, and your goal is to double your revenue in five years and become the number one option for healthy living in your city. But you’re currently having issues with online orders and need to streamline your fulfillment process. So your challenge is to develop a digital marketing strategy and improve your backend operations, but you don’t have the bandwidth to focus on these projects.

Step 2: Identify the expertise that you need.

Once you’ve identified your challenges or opportunities, the next step in creating a successful growth strategy is to think about what types of expertise you need to achieve your goals.

Going back to our example of a health food store owner, you’ll need marketing, public relations, and social media expertise to reach a larger audience and double revenue. To address the issues with online orders, you’ll need logistics or operations support to analyze the current process, identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and improve logistics.

Step 3: Prioritize and scope your project(s).

Once you’ve identified the areas of expertise you will need, the next step is to prioritize your list and divide your projects into “stackable” projects that can be completed in stages. Scoping a project will help you list out all the to-dos in one place and focus on the key tasks for your growth strategy. And breaking them down into multiple, smaller projects allows you to focus on the most important tasks first.

Step 4: Find the right talent.

After you have scoped your project, you will need to think about who will implement each of the steps. There are several ways to find help, including hiring full-time employees with the necessary expertise or training junior employees. However, both of these approaches require time and money.

What if, instead, you could find motivated students to work on your projects? Hiring interns provides a host of benefits, including:

• Expertise: Students are mentored by professors in their fields of study.
• Innovation: Students at higher education institutions are exposed to the latest innovations in their fields and can bring fresh and creative perspectives to your project.
• Professionalism: Many higher education institutions provide training for their students on how to conduct themselves in the workplace, and work-based learning partners, such as Riipen, have students sign codes of conduct before facilitating matches with employers.
• Cost: Student interns provide their services in return for academic credit or for a small stipend, which may be covered through workforce development programs like Riipen Labs, Level UP, or FuturePath.
• Speed: By leveraging partners like Riipen, you can quickly access an existing network of qualified students so you can hire the right talent in a short period of time.
• Pipeline: Internships give employers an opportunity to work with a student in a low-risk environment and determine if they might be a good, longer-term fit for their organization.

Step 5: Get started with Riipen today!

As you can see, hiring students for project-based internships is a smart, affordable strategy for growing your business, and Riipen can help you get started in three easy steps.

First, create a free account.

Next, submit your project to our marketplace, specifying how many teams you want working on your project.

Then browse and apply to open educators and students with the expertise you need, or wait for an educator to send you a match request.

It’s that easy. . ‍

And if you’ve never worked with student talent before? Our website is full of helpful information to help employers get started.

But don’t just take our word for it, see what real employers have to say about working with real students to help grow their business:

‍“Using Level UP significantly accelerated our project timelines and enhanced our ability to deliver high-quality work without the need for permanent hires,” said Ore Ogunlude from La Fleur Digital about this business hack. “By leveraging the program, we were able to complete six core service illustrations for our website in just three weeks, saving about 25% of the time compared to traditional hiring methods. Overall, Level UP provided both cost savings and efficiency, helping us achieve our goals faster and with enhanced creativity.”

Join over 40,000 employers who are finding bright, student talent to grow their business with Riipen. Connect with us to learn more.