Growing Your Business

Have you invested a lot in getting your business off the ground but now feel as though it’s reached a plateau? 

Launching a business successfully is hard enough in this day and age but achieving growth once you’ve done this is something else altogether.

If you want to take your business to the next stage there are plenty of strategies you can use to achieve this. The ones you choose will depend upon what kind of company you are and exactly what kind of expansion you are going for. 

Here are some areas you might want to consider:

Form An Alliance: Setting up a partnership with a similar kind of business, or one that complements your own, can be a very effective method of expansion. To give an example on a small scale: if you’re running a wedding planning business why not form an alliance with a catering company? Yes, you may have to shell out some of your own money initially to make it happen, but in the long-term the synergies between your companies should increase your prospects immeasurably.

Expand Online: If you don’t already have an online presence, you’re automatically missing out on a huge opportunity for growth. You need a well-designed website with clear descriptions of your products and services. So many people these days would rather buy online but they will expect to be able to do so quickly and easily, so you should make sure that the check-out system you use is highly efficient. To ensure your website has good visibility, hire an online marketing expert to implement an SEO strategy and teach you about other effective strategies – such as email marketing – to make the most of your online presence.

Open Another Site: If you have one shop or office and it simply isn’t meeting your needs anymore, it may be time to expand elsewhere. This could be to extend to another area of the country, or simply to give you further space to take on new clients or stock more product lines. Yes, physical expansion is always a risk but at some point you will have to take a leap of this kind if you want to take your business to the next level. Just make sure you have a strong, experienced management team in place to run it, that you have created a solid business plan and that you have done your homework in terms of consumer and economic trends.

Diversification: If you have taken your existing product or service offering as far as it can go, it may be time to look at selling complementary products or services. As a growth strategy, this is a fairly safe bet as you are simply building on your existing success and client base. It allows you to have several streams of income to increase sales and profit margins, and well as potentially dealing with seasonal slumps.