There will (hopefully) come a day when you can successfully grow your business to the next level. When that day comes, the worst thing you can do is stunt the growth of your business due to a lack of understanding or having no real intention or plans to expand your business. If you are presented with an opportunity to grow your business, then you’ll be doing yourself, the industry and your employees a favour by taking that chance and growing your business.
ImagePreparing your growth
The sign of a great business leader is their ability to capitalise on growth spurts. When you sense that your business can take the next step and grow, you need to be prepared for it. For instance, take a look at your office and try to envision what it would be like with more employees. Do you think you have enough space to accommodate more employees, or will you need a larger office? Think about local amenities too. Do you have a fast enough internet connection to backup files and upload data quickly? Or could you do with a faster dedicated line? There are many things to think about and the cost of expanding is just one of the main issues.
Whenever your company makes a profit, you should always reinvest that money back into your business. There are many large businesses such as Amazon and Uber that do not make a profit because all of the money is reinvested back into the business in order to make even more money and expand. Companies like Microsoft make very little profit because all of their resources are poured into a single objective: market domination.
Hiring a larger workforce
When you grow a business, one of the major things on your mind is going to be employee numbers. Do you have enough employees to operate a more demanding business, or will you need to hire more? And what about the types of employees? Are you going to need an experienced chief executive to oversee your business? If your business is large enough to be noticed on a global scale and you have hundreds or thousands of employees, you’re going to need a figurehead that is trained and experienced in managing a huge company.
What about departments? Are you going to need extra workers to make up a tech department to repair and maintain the hardware in your office? Are you going to need a marketing department to devise promotional strategies? There is a lot to think about, and the worst thing you can do is be understaffed to a point you have to overwork your employees.
Dominate a market or diversify
Using the previous example of Microsoft, did you know that they currently have over 90% share in the operating systems market? It’s a ridiculously high figure but they trump both Mac OS and Linux combined by a huge number. In fact, Windows 7 alone accounts for over 50% of the market share. With such a massive influence over a single market, Microsoft has very little competition to go up against and you can safely say that they have dominated the market.
Alternatively, you could diversify. Amazon, for example, has evolved from the days of being an online retailer. They now provide movie rentals, a video streaming platform, a music streaming platform, and they are even rolling out fast food delivery services across the world. Amazon has chosen to use the profits they’ve had as an online retailer to expand their operations into newer fields and they are handly competing despite being such a diverse company.
When you start to grow your business, you need to think about what products you are offering and if it is feasible to dominate the market. You can’t dominate a market and diversify with the same funds, you have to pick one and stick with it. Spreading your resources too thinly is a terrible idea, and you’ll never successfully grow if you aren’t sticking you a goal.
Summary
Planning is the most important component in growing your business. If you don’t have a sound strategy or a path to expand, then you’re stunting your growth and you need to immediately formulate a plan so that when the time comes, you can embrace changes and capitalise on your success. If you’re unfamiliar with business growth or the idea of hiring new employees and diversifying your markets, then it’s time to learn. If you refuse to change with your business and forever stunt its growth, then you will never become the successful business owner that you want to be.
