Back when you were just starting with your business, it’s likely to imagine how you can grow from a local brand to something you could take on a global market. You thought about adding new offices, hiring more people, offering round-the-clock operations.It was easy to think about it back then, but now that you’ve finally found success in a small market, expanding to a bigger one could be a bit intimidating.
There are those who fail to capitalize on opportunities to expand simply because they’re too anxious about growing bigger. And when they finally decide to do so, it would often be too late for them because someone else took their chance. In order not to miss your opportunity to expand, here are some of the signs telling you that it’s time to grow the business.
Continuously Exceeding Your Goals
Meeting or even exceeding your business goals is a sign of success. But that doesn’t mean you need to expand right away. It simply means you were successful in reaching your sales targets, or delivering excellent products or services for a certain period. However, if you are continuously exceeding your goals month after month, you might want to step back, look at the bigger picture, and decide if it’s the perfect time to expand your business.
Continuously exceeding your goals means you’ve dominated your niche, and that you’ve grown too big for your market, that you can now grow and expand to a bigger one. Your brand, even though you’ve started small, is slowly getting famous, and it’s the perfect time to leverage that fame and turn them into solid leads and profits. Be careful not to miss this window of opportunity, though. If you don’t act immediately, the hype surrounding your brand could die down.
You’re Turning Down More Opportunities
Before, when you were just starting with your business, you’d happily grab every opportunity that comes your way. Now, though, you’ve been more choosy, especially if you think you’ll experience any bottlenecks in production or service delivery. You can’t accommodate customers doubling their orders because you don’t have any production resources. It’s a nice problem to have, but you should consider this as a sign that you need to expand as soon as possible.
For example you’re supplying auto parts to several distributors. You’ve maxed out your inventory and can’t accommodate any requests for any order increase. Instead of declining, you should use this as a way to explore opportunities to expand. Get help from third-party plastic injection molding companies to increase your production. Hire more people, even for shorter contracts, to get more help in the assembly line. Channel your younger self back when you’re starting, and explore every opportunity you can get to grow.
Bullet-proof Concept, Absolute Reliability
When you see the complaints and returns go down to a very negligible number, you know your business is already very reliable. You provide solid service or high quality product, and there’s really no logical step next except for taking on a bigger market.Be bold; being too conservative and just staying at your comfort zone won’t get you anything. Indeed, you get the stability you want for your business, but for how long? If you try and explore a bigger market, you’ll also have the luxury of expanding your product or service offerings, thus increasing the chance of successfully thriving for a longer time.
