Making The Right Choice In Growing A Business Once a business is up and running successfully, meaning it is showing a steady profit, many owners still look for ways to make it grow.
For many owners, a business is like children that they gave birth to, nourished and worked hard to bring them through the early years and are now looking to see them grow even bigger.
It takes more that hope for a business to grow and to insure its sustainability, it needs to be planned as well.
The first step in growing any business is to assess its current position.
The business may not be doing as well as the books show and it may be treading water from an overall performance perspective that makes it appear as though it is doing better than it really is.
To determine if your business should grow you will want to conduct a SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
By reviewing the strengths of your business, you can determine if the model by which it operates is sufficient to support growth.
Is your product or service readily accepted by the masses or is your target customer part of a small niche? Once you have determined the strengths of your business, look at what you could be doing better.
Even successful businesses rely on frequent self-analysis to insure their strengths remain strong and their weaknesses do not lead to failure.
By assessing your company's weaknesses, you can turn them into strengths.
Conduct more market research to determine what the opportunities are for your business and if there is room to grow.
Depending on the industry, your current geographic area may already be saturated with outlets for the same or similar services and trying to grow will be an exercise in futility.
Growth is only possible if there is an area in which you can achieve more for the business.
In today's business climate, there are many threats to every type of business.
Do not confuse threats with danger as threats can include new competition entering the market or new regulations that can affect the way your business is run.
Many times new laws and regulations will actually prevent businesses from growing, even when they appear to have nothing to do with the industry.
For example, a business operating on a shoe string budget will be drastically affected if the state in which they are located is planning to increase the minimum hourly wage.
This threat to the expense line of the P&L will have to be considered when planning any type of growth strategy.