When you start to see a significant level of success on the market, you should be thinking about expanding your business. If you do decide to expand, it’s important that you have a positive mindset about what could happen and what you can achieve. You need to make sure that you are moving forward with a clear idea of what your business could become. The good news is that there are lots of different directions to choose from when expanding your business. It’s like standing still, slowly turning. You can stop at any point and then head in any direction. As such, your business could become something radically different, and you can completely rebrand it and reshape it.
Today, we’re going to look at some of these directions, discover why they could be beneficial to you and help you choose the right path for your company. This could mean expanding overseas, focusing on work that will help the environment, investing in new technology or perhaps expanding the services that you are offering to attract new clients and customers. We can start by thinking about expanding overseas.
Hitting The International Market With Your Business
Most companies don’t start off selling on an international level, and there are a few reasons for this. The first is the expense. It should be no secret that selling on an international level is going to be more expensive and involve a greater number of costs compared with selling to a local audience. If you are selling products, you will need to think about shipping, packaging, and imports. You will also need to be able to provide the same level of support to the customers overseas as well. Again, this all leads to a greater level of costs that you probably won’t be able to handle when you’re running an SME.
As such, you do need to wait for your business to achieve a certain level of success before entering the global market. Once you do, you can then think about reaching out to a global audience. Remember, thanks to rapid transactions, quick processes, and virtually no barriers, the entire business market is global these days. You can, effectively, choose to sell to whoever you want, regardless of distance.
However, first, you need to make sure that the demand for your product exists. To do this, it’s worth hiring a digital marketing agency that can handle an international audience. The key thing to remember about selling at an international level is that you’ll be facing far greater competition. As such, you have to bring something completely different and unique to your marketing campaign. Luckily, there are a variety of options to consider here such as user-generated content. With user-generated content you can engage your customers in a direct way and make them feel as though they are a key part of the campaign.
Before you even begin marketing, you might also want to use an analytics company. You can use their services to discover whether there is interest in the products that you offer overseas.
Many people think that to sell products overseas on an international level, you need to put a lot of work in, building up a platform for sales and such. But with things like eBay and Amazon, there’s no need for that type of work anymore. Instead, you can piggyback off the existing platforms and cut out most of the grunt work. You will, however, need to be prepared for the companies to take a cut of your profits.
Branching Out With Fresh Services
You should be working to diversify your business model as much as possible. By doing this, you will make sure that your sources of profit are spread out and that hopefully, one doesn’t impact the other. A basic example of this would be a car mechanic company. Now, the main service that you’re probably offering will be fixing cars. Right now, you could be offering this service purely to private car owners.
But if you wanted to dramatically expand profits you should be targeting large companies. That way, you can be responsible for fixing and maintaining fleets of cars which means a massive payment for one job. You can easily see how this would benefit your company. As well as that, you could also offer side services as well such as an MOT or even annual car servicing.
On top of services, you could then provide products that are related to your company such as tires and car spare parts. You can see how all of these different sources of profit fit with the company, but each one is not dependent on another.
You might think that this type of expansion is only relevant to that type of business model, but it could work for a variety of companies offering different services. For instance, you might be running a marketing agency, offering your services to clients to help them rank. Since you have a certain level of expertise and possibly a pro team of staff you could also expand to offer courses, teaching the skills that you have mastered yourself.
By doing this, you would be giving your clients a chance to learn to improve and expand their own marketing campaigns, and some will be more intrigued by this possibility than paying for the service.
Of course, the classic way to add an extra source of profit to your business would be through outsourcing. As well as servicing private clients you could offer your service to companies as well and as such but yourself in a position where you will be able to work as a B2B business and a private company. Virtually every business today engages in some form of outsourcing because it is a way to cut costs while maintaining the same level of quality and ensuring that things do not fall through the cracks.
Becoming A Positive Force
Of course, one of the best ways to expand your business might be not to focus on profits at all. Instead, you should think about how you can use your company to benefit the planet and the world. There are a few reasons for this. First, the concept of increasing profits and doing good can inter-lap as we will explain a little further down. Second, it shows that your business is not a number-crunching machine which may make it far more attractive to customers. Third, it fits into the LOA because you will be putting positive energy into the world and this could lead to great rewards. The question is: how do you do this?
As already mentioned, sometimes benefiting the world can also benefit your income. This is certainly true in the case of briquetting. Through briquetting, you can make biofuel out of the waste from processes in your company. This biofuel can then be sold. It’s beneficial to the environment, and it’s yet another source of profits for your business. To do this, you just need to invest in the necessary equipment which is available at prices lower than most people realize.
Of course, you can also support NFP organizations and charities. You could do this, perhaps by adding a donation option for customers each time they buy one of your products or use a service. Alternatively, you could fund an NFP of your choosing out of the profits that you receive from customers.
Or, perhaps you might just want to donate your time. A lot of companies these days work to ensure that at least once a year their full team of staff engage in volunteer work to help or support a charitable cause. As well as having a positive impact on the world, it is also a great option for promotion and could drive interest in your business through the roof.
You might also want to consider setting out to directly impact the world with your business and a positive energy. An example of this type of action would be bio-bean. The tech giant gained great success by focusing on producing a biofuel made from waste material that could be used to power public transport. A number of new startups and indeed older companies are finding great success and substantial profits purely by investing time and effort into this type of cause, using their resources to benefit the environment. Others meanwhile work to solve international issues like world hunger, and by pushing your business in this direction, you could reap a great many benefits.
As you can see then, there are a variety of different directions that you can take your company in when it’s time for an expansion. You can transform your company into something far greater and more powerful than it is today, both in terms of customer recognition. Even indirect actions could expand your business reach and allow you to gain a fresh audience who are indeed eager to buy your products or use your services. We wish you luck with your own business expansion and hope that you find the right path for your company.
