Essential strategies for expanding your business

Want to expand your business? Here are four strategies to try.

You’ve got your startup off the ground, and it is now a well-established industry player. You have a team of employees with ambition and drive who want to take your business to the next stage.

Your leadership is crucial at this time if you want to build upon your success and move from being a plucky small enterprise into becoming an industry leader in your chosen field.

All expansion must be strategically planned and executed to maximize its chance of success. Expansion can happen in numerous ways for any business. Here are four options to take into account as you plan your business’ next move. 

1) Deepen your product range 

Whether it is services or goods that your company provides, you will likely have started with a limited range of options targeted at a specific audience demographic.

If you have built trust and strong relationships with your clientele, you can use this by offering them more customized products to their needs. For example, if you sell prams, could you expand into selling car seats. Similarly If you are a car dealer, you can also consider selling used cars or trucks. The same audience demographic, but more products are available.

Similarly, with services, if you provide web design, could you also look at packaging design? 

2) Expand geographically 

It’s likely that you started your business in a small territory, so spreading your geographic reach is a great option to grow your business.  For instance, if you own a shop front, can you look to open other stores in nearby towns?

Even if you exist online, you can expand by offering distribution in other countries or creating domains specific to each country and their currency. If you are creating a wholesale product, consider whether you would benefit from cutting out the middleman and providing your own distribution.

Purchasing some vans for sale could allow your business to grow exponentially as you can offer your goods quickly to customers without the need for haulage or shipping companies. 

3) Expand your target demographic 

If you have become known and respected for a particular product or service, think creatively about selling that product or service to more customers. Are there audiences that you have not previously targeted through marketing campaigns?

With some attention and focussed campaigns, you can build your client list by simply offering your expertise to more people. Taking the same examples as we used before, prams may seem niche and can only be sold to parents.

But have you thought about local nurseries that may also need prams or even an innovative campaign that urges grandparents to consider purchasing a secondary pram for those babysitting sessions?

If you provide web design to businesses, could you also approach local government authorities and see if they need their websites updated? 

4) Diversify Your Brand

If you are very ambitious, you could consider expanding your company into a whole new territory, using your brand’s identity to spread into other areas.

Virgin is an excellent example of this; starting as a record shop in 1972, it now is a global brand with a media arm, multiple travel businesses, and even a futuristic space program. 

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson