6 Ways to Promote Business Growth
The most successful, stable businesses are ones that prioritize business growth and development. Once a company has survived start-up and created a strong foundation and brand for itself, the logical next step is to expand on what’s already built. There are plenty of ways to grow a business, but the key to successful expansion is finding the best strategy for your business’s unique offerings.
Ready to commit to business growth? Here are six options to consider when expanding your business.
1. Open Another Location
This is likely the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of business growth – but that doesn’t mean it’s the best option. Just because a current business is profitable doesn’t guarantee the same level of success in a new location. Invest the same amount of time, research, and thought into a new location as you did your initial business venture. Put together a business plan, investigate consumer and economic trends to evaluate long-term success, and ensure that you have a star management team behind you.
2. Diversify
Diversifying can be especially beneficial for business owners looking to fill a seasonal gap or that want to branch out beyond their current customer base. However, when diversifying, it’s important to create complementary products and services that add to (not contradict) your business. Stay true to your brand identity and remain consistent with your business’s vision. Grow your business by creating products or services that grow and evolve with your current target audience.
3. Start a Franchise
This is not a business growth opportunity to be taken lightly, but, when done correctly, franchises can be rewarding and profitable. Franchises don’t just require rock solid external branding and marketing, they need to have reliable and teachable internal branding as well. If you’re considering a franchise, be sure to educate yourself first. Start networking with other members of the franchise community, find a trustworthy franchise attorney, and seek advice from more experienced business owners who might have explored the franchise process before.
4. Go Global
Does your business have a product or service that could serve an international market? Then take it global! Whether that means establishing new offices in other areas of the world or simply priming your offering for an international market, you could have a whole new foreign audience feeding your bottom line. Make sure to find a reliable foreign distributor that’s willing to stock your product and sell it to their own domestic market.
5. License Your Product
If you’re looking to take smaller steps into expansion, licensing your product can be an effective, low-risk, and low-cost way to grow your business (or to make money on a product idea without even starting a business!). Once you’ve licensed your product, you can turn around and sell it to larger, wealthier companies for profit and royalties! Be sure that, before you go to a licensing company, you connect with an attorney specializing in intellectual property rights to ensure you don’t lose control of your product or service.
6. Start Another Business
Feeling nostalgic about the good ole’ days of starting your small business? Maybe your best option is just to do it all over again. Start brainstorming all of those other ideas you have and write up a business plan for a business behind a different product or service that you want to offer. Even better, build a complementary business to your old one so that you can share each other’s audience and success and promote one another. The best way to start an empire is to take it one business at a time.
No matter how you want to approach business growth, it’s important to remember that you have options. And that you don’t have to do it alone! Call Evolution Brands today at 239.307.6087 to find out how we can help you expand into new territory.