With all the focus on startups, we often forget that in the business world expansion and development are vital avenues to success as well. In fact, for longevity, the way you will maintain and grow your businesses by feeding into new markets is essential. With this in mind, read on for some useful tactics on how to take your company from small fry to big business.
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Identify new revenue channels
One of the first steps to a successful business expansion is that you need to consider the areas that your company could move into. This may be defined by the fields that you already work within. Alternatively, it may be defined by a new use for a product that you make within another industry.
Although, whichever route leads you to your expansion success it is vital to fully investigate the market beforehand using methods such as customer studies and market research, including focus groups and surveys. The reason for this being that knowing which demographic to aim your product to can help show whether it will be worth the investment, as well as make things easier if you do decide to launch.
Knowing who your potential market will be is vital for expansion.
Investigate costs
Another important tactic that you can use to be successful in business expansion is to investigate the full costs of things before you start. Such an investigation should include things like the cost of making the product or setting up the service, as well as the administration cost for the team.
It’s also important that you not forget to factor in any hidden costs such as the price of research and development that occurs before you make the decision on whether to expand. Transportation and delivery issues are also something that often gets passed over in expansion costings, but they may change significantly if you are offering products and services different than the things your company traditionally sells.
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Luckily, for the latter problem, there are some alternatives such as hiring trucks from places like Flex Fleet Rental to get your team or product where they need to go. An option that can allow you to trial your expansion on a small scale without having to invest in an entirely new fleet before rolling it out countrywide.
Hire people
On the surface, the tactic of hiring new people when you are explaining your business seems pretty simple. However, as with any situation where people are concerned, it can get complicated quickly.
This is due to the fact that you will need to select the best people for the expansion project that you are working on, but also bear in mind how they gel with your established staff.
The reason for this is that the dynamic between different staff members in a business plays a huge role on how effective and productive your company can be. That means if you want things to run smoothly, you will need to invest some serious time in picking permanent team members that integrate with your pre-existing team.
However, there is another alternative to this, and it’s using freelance workers on a project by project basis. This can be especially useful in a situation where you need expert advice to set something up, but where a longer-term role would be not viable in term of cost.