If you’ve managed to launch a new business and keep it going long enough to start making a profit, well done. You’ve made it further than a lot of other people do. The next step for your company now is expansion. You could always carry on as you are if you’re happy with the performance of the business but most people want to see it grow. Offering new products, expanding your manufacturing operation and moving into a bigger office all costs a lot of money, which makes business growth an incredibly risky game to play. If you get it wrong and you don’t see a return on all of that extra investment, the business could fail altogether. Luckily, you can prevent that by using these simple methods to take some of the risks out of business expansion.
Hire The Right People
Without a good team of employees, your plan for expansion is always going to fall flat. That’s why you need to make sure that you’re hiring the right people in all of the major positions. Producing more products is fine but you’ll need more customers to buy them, otherwise, you’re going to start losing money. That’s why you need a top-notch marketing team in place before you start growing. Hopefully, if they do their job effectively, you’ll be bringing in a lot more revenue than you were before. In which case, you need a professional accountant to keep track of all of your money. If you don’t stay on top of your finances, spending can easily get out of control and you’ll burn through all of your cash in no time. If you aren’t hiring the best people for these crucial positions, you’ll really struggle.
Use Temporary Staff
While you need to fill the important positions, you should be careful about how many people you’re hiring. If costs get out of control, you might have to cut back on your staff to save money and stay afloat. It’s also difficult to know just how many staff members you’ll need once you expand. That’s why it’s a good idea to use temporary staffing to start with. It’ll be a lot easier to get rid of people if they aren’t permanent staff members which makes life a lot easier for you during the transition period when you’re working out exactly how many members of staff you need.
If you want to find a team that can help you build your business without the commitment of permanent employees, outsourcing some departments is also beneficial for growth. Many thriving companies will look at specialist IT Support companies to maintain systems and protect data and information. The same goes for finance and content creation. The benefit of this approach is that these companies will become familiar with your business, but you only need to use them when required. This can minimize costs that will enable you to focus funds in other areas of your enterprise.
Research Growth Opportunities
This is probably the most important thing to remember. It’s all good and well coming up with a new product idea and trying to expand your range, but if there’s no market for that new product then you’re going to fail. Before you put a plan into action, you need to do some solid market research and identify where the opportunities for growth are. So many businesses are good with research when they first launch the company but neglect it at the growth stage and it comes back to bite them.
Follow these 3 rules and you’ll be able to massively reduce the risks of business expansion.