When you run your own business, you always need to keep one eye on the future. Standing still just means you fall behind, and you always have to run to keep up.
Let’s take a look at different ways you can grow your business, and what that might mean depending on your situation.
Opening a New Branch
This is the most direct way to grow your business: find a new location and expand your business into it. This doesn’t just provide more income, it makes your business more resilient: if demographics shift in your original home, meaning your business is no longer a good fit for the market, you’ll already have a new base of operations prepared and can shift your focus there.
It’s important to do your research properly before you commit to this. It takes time for a new branch to start paying its way and if you don’t have a waiting market in your new location who will become your new loyal customers you may find you’ve overstretched yourself, leading to the collapse of your new venture.
Grow Your Team
Expanding physically isn’t always appropriate: if you’re not a physical retail business and offer services and consultation rather than goods, simply opening a new office won’t have the same effect.
The most effect form of growth for businesses like this is to take on more staff. Judicious hiring doesn’t just increase your capacity to work more but also brings vital new skills into your team that allows you to expand your service and innovate to ensure that you’re keeping pace with developments in your field. This is the key to your success when you’re positioned in a service based niche like marketing: you need to ensure you regularly have new, effective offers for your clients to prove to them you’re relevant to the changing marketplace.
It may also be worth speaking to Executive Recruitment firm and bringing in some higher level staff. While it’s important to develop your own executives from within your business, as this motivates staff and ensures you have high level decision makers who know your business from top to bottom, bringing in people from outside also brings their experience and contacts with them, which give you fresh ideas to work with, and the potential of lucrative new clients.
Remember, however you’re trying to grow your business to never spend money you can’t afford to lose. There are risks to expanding as well as benefits and you need to ensure you have resources to fall back on if one effort fails.