Expanding Your Small Business

By Michelle Loredo

As the situation with pandemic continues to improve, growing your business can be a good segue into opportunities to improve your bottom line.

If you are looking into expanding your business, there are several things to keep in mind including, how your business will be affected by the change and how your finances will impact expansion plans. We have put together a guide on expanding your small business and what to keep in mind.

Continue to Innovate Business 

As you are planning to expand your small business, you have to evaluate your current business strategy. What can help with your expansion, what can be improved and what needs to be added? It can include:

• Be Proactive with Tracking Benchmarks and Adjust as Necessary. 

• How Will Benchmarks Be Set? (Start, Growth, Revenue, Success, Exit)

• What Direction of Growth Can Your Business Take?

As you begin to implement changes to your business strategy, not everything will go smoothly. If a part of the expansion strategy is not working, figure out what is not working and improve going forward. 

When working on your strategy, see how you can expand your market reach. Reaching new customers will help your bottom line and improve your business. What are the current trends in your market? To continue to grow your business, you can diversify your business's services. Take into account the type of business you operate, what you offer and what you can add. It will help you bridge the gaps of service that your business has. 

What are the customers in your area looking for? How can your strategy bring in new clients? You can also look into niches and how your business can fill gaps in needed areas and, becoming part of a niche can help you be a major player within your market. 

Another way to expand your business is to open franchises. Before you decide that franchising will work with your business, examine your business and brand, and determine if it can appeal to a broad audience. You need to also need to have a duplicable business model. Here a few things to keep in mind if you forward with franchising: 

• Branding Business Materials (Logos, Color Schemes, etc.) 

• Branding Business Services

• Licensing Business Model

Exporting is another option to expand your business. Becoming part of the international trade can help you grow your business and better your bottom line. If you are planning to export, you need to have different things in order including: 

• Business Contracts 

• Country-Specific Trade Laws

• Language Barriers