How do you decide to expand your business? How can you tell if the fit is right, and if this expansion really makes sense?
I talked with a potential entrepreneur yesterday. He is having trouble settling his business idea down to just one thing. With so many market opportunities available, he found his new business was swelling out of his reach. Deciding what to include and what to leave out can be tough!
At Decisive Flow (a New Zealand web design firm), they have just expanded, adding Small Business Marketing Tailored to Your Needs.
A lot of our customers don’t have marketing strategies. This has caused a few issues with web design as we struggle to see how we can deliver sites that generate new business when the base we are working on is non existant. So Decisive Flow have expanded our services.
Adding marketing services made sense in their case, because their current customers, small businesses, had a need for it, and no source. They also had the expertise already; no need to bring in additional experts or retrain themselves.
I think these are the best business expansions to consider:
- Customer driven
- Market niche tailored
- Take advantage of your existing skills in a new way
Rather than let yourself be pulled in a thousand different directions, make sure you pick products and services that group together naturally. Marketing and web design are closely related, a good match. The potential business owner I talked to yesterday was thinking about a whole raft of possible services. They were all related in one sense, but with radically different targets, and many different providers. The longer we talked, the more he talked himself into a narrower field, one of closely related targets.
Weigh each expansion carefully. It’s like a whole new business to launch. Be sure you give it the care it deserves.
small biz rural entrepreneurship expansion startup
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
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I think you have to distinguish between growth and expansion – getting bigger. Expansion is when 1+1=2 growth is when 1+1=3. So if add another line of product this is not real growth. But, if you are able to utilize previous experiences to lunch a product that has higher profit margin – then it is growth. Just something to keep in mind.