After surviving the initial years of operation, your business is thriving and providing a steady stream of income. For many people, this is their goal. They are happy with how the company is going and are content with letting it go on that way. But some people want more. If you are one of those, then you will want to grow your business even more. Expanding can be a challenge, and it can put your company at risk. Here are your options for growing your business even more:
Deeper Market Penetration
The most straightforward approach is to penetrate the market even deeper. It has minimal risk since it is only taking your current strategy and increasing it. You will still be selling the same product or service, but you will be aiming to increase in volume. There are two ways to do this. First, you can convince your current buyers to buy more. This is usually by offering them promos or discounts. This can be simple since they are already your customers. Second, you also need to get more customers. Aggressive marketing efforts can do this. You can also aim to change your pricing so that it is more competitive against others.
Increasing your market share will lead you to get more profits. But this will increase your competition with others in the market. You have to do some market research so that you can stay competitive. Additionally, since you will be increasing your sales, you should also look into increasing the production or supply of your products. Many businesses forget this and don’t have enough supply to meet the demand, which results in disappointed customers.
You can also increase your customers by developing your product. There might be people who like your product but don’t buy it because of missing features. Enhancing your current offering and services can be great for your market share. It will cost you since product development will require testing and resources, but it also allows you to sell new models of old products to current customers and have a chance to attract new ones.
Developing Your Market Presence
The other strategy you can do is to develop your market presence. Your business is in one part of the market right now, but there are more potential customers out there. The easiest way to develop your presence in the market is to open a new branch or have a new distributor. If you are a store or restaurant, this will involve a new location. This can be a major operation and can cost you a lot of money. This will be like starting your business all over again but in a different place. If you don’t have a brick-and-mortar place but sell through retailers, then you will be looking to get stores to stock your products. Despite a much easier hurdle to overcome, this brings its challenges.
Learning how to franchise a business can be a big help for this particular strategy. Instead of doing everything yourself, you can have people buy a franchise from you and then have them develop a new branch. Much of the funding will be from their pockets so that you don’t waste any of your own money. You still need to put in some effort since your franchise won’t succeed unless you develop it into a good process that will make accepting new franchisees easy.
You don’t even need to make a physical location. Thanks to online development, your business can have a branch with no physical presence with an online store. This can be a significant advantage to your business. Online purchases allow for customers to buy from you at any time and from anywhere. This can enable your company to have a lot of new customers.
Diversify Your Offerings
The riskiest strategy for growth is to diversify your offerings. Many businesses that are well-known right now started in different fields. For example, people know Samsung from electronics, but it began with sugar refining. You don’t have to jump that far in fields. Consider expanding into a related field so that you have some idea of what you are doing. For example, if you are a restaurant, then consider starting another one with a different concept. You might try for a fine ding establishment instead of fast food if that was your original idea for your establishment.
Growing a business is a major step. Knowing what your options can make it easy for you to decide on what you will be doing next for your business.
