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As we approach a new year of ambitions, goals and progress, many businesses will be looking for opportunities to grow. Whether that’s opening new locations, adding to your inventory or boosting your marketing to bring in fresh customers, growth is the goal for the majority of businesses – especially in a time of downturn like we currently face. A bigger business, supported by more customers from different segments of the market is more stable than a smaller one supported by a single, small tribe.
Today we’re looking at how you can ready yourself for growth in the year ahead, and avoid falling into some of the pitfalls that a growing business can encounter.
Do You Have a Strategy?
It’s important for your expansion ambitions to be shaped by your business strategy – and if you don’t have one, to write one. This is different to your business plan, which is a document reassuring investors you intend to make a success of your idea. Your strategy tells you how you’re going to do it at a high level. How you’ll seek funding, and as importantly, how you won’t, the red lines you won’t cross, the brand image you’re creating, the things that are important for you.
Your strategy is what makes all your separate decisions pull together to create a coherent business, so if you don’t have one, it’s worth approaching one of the strategy consulting firms London is host to get some assistance.
Funding
Of course, growing your business comes with costs. The cost of new premises and staff, more stock, more marketing, research and development for more products and services – any kind of expansion is costly. It also takes some time before any expansion effort breaks even and starts to support itself, which means the rest of your business will be supporting it until then.
It’s important to cost this carefully. If it takes longer for your expansion effort to pay off than you calculate you may find yourself in a financial black hole, obliged to take on debt or permanently lose a measure of control over your business. Make sure your funding is assured before you commit or you could find expansion costly in more ways than one.
Brand Consistency
In many ways, your brand is your most potent asset as a business, and it’s not directly built by you: it’s built by customers. You provide the puzzle pieces, in your advertising, your website, who picks up the phone when people call for help, even your price point and opening hours, but it’s the customers who put them together and build that all important personal relationship with your business.
You need to make sure anything new added by an expansion is consistent: they need to be pieces to the same puzzle. A value based store suddenly stocking a wildly expensive product, or a luxury brand opening new premises in an industrial estate, simply because you could get a good deal there, harms your entire brand: it stops being coherent for your customers and that has financial results for your whole business.
