The prospect of growing and expanding a business can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. If you have a successful business, it is very tempting to consider leveraging that to try to build something even bigger and better. Conversely, it can feel like taking an unnecessary risk to change what you already have – why mess around with something you know works?
The reality is – especially in today’s world – that the pace of change in markets, industries and the business landscape at large, is such that businesses rarely have any option other than to constantly refine, remodel, reinvent, adapt and reconfigure. In a nutshell, in the vast majority of cases, if your business isn’t growing – it’s fading away.
This article covers the usual advice to give you the foundation you need, then adds on 20 top tips for growing a business successfully.
Table of Contents
In Which Ways Can a Business Grow or Expand?
First, let’s consider the options available to a business wanting to grow:
- Optimise the Existing Market – focus on increasing sales to current customers
- Create New Products or Services – focus on attracting additional sales
- Expand the Customer Base – focus on attracting new customers
- Geographic Expansion – focus on new markets in new locations
- Diversify – focus on new products or services into new markets
In most cases, businesses will want to explore a combination of, or even all of, these options when looking to expand. Every business situation is of course highly unique, but there are common threads that run through, which are a good starting point for any business interested in further growth or diversification.
For those businesses looking for a fast route; available options include acquiring other businesses, franchising or forming strategic partnerships with other companies for example.
For all businesses considering growth; research, risk assessments and available funding options are always top of the list for first steps to take. Fully exploring all potentially available options is a must, as is a clear strategic plan for where you want to get to combined with the optimum timeline for doing so. Everything you investigate, consider and decide on must be data-driven, in as much detail as possible.
20 Top Tips for Expanding and Diversifying a Business
Beyond the fundamentals, there are a number of ways in which you can reduce your risk and increase your chances of success when embarking on any company growth journey.
Proper Preparation
- Growth Begins with Clarity – measure precisely where you are now; measurement must be meticulous and multi-dimensional. You need to know exactly where you are starting from and what your current strengths and weaknesses are.
- Growth Should Be Strategic – growth for the sake of growth without clear direction and purpose can erode brand clarity, dilute resources and distract from core objectives. Ensure you can fully justify any potential move with a clear ‘why’.
- Know Your Numbers – by maintaining constant, precise awareness and understanding of your exact financial position you can seize unexpected opportunities and act quickly to mitigate emerging risks.
- Legal Literacy is a Strategic Advantage – before you start, ensure you have safeguarded all your intellectual property and other key assets through robust legal protections. Be certain that existing contracts and business relationships are optimised for both legal standing and commercial advantage.
- Be Honest, Not Optimistic – it is easy to get swept up in enthusiasm, especially during the early period of a company’s life. Make sure you are acting based on cold, hard facts and not a wishful spin on them – this is not the moment for ‘hit and hope’.
People Power
- It is the ‘Who’ not the ‘How’ – you can have the most brilliant new product or service, the best strategic plan in the world and the most generous of backers – but when it comes down to it, the deciding factor in whether or not any venture succeeds or fails is usually the people behind it. Hone your skills and processes to be able to make the most accurate assessments possible of people’s characteristics, current capabilities and future potential.
- Look Carefully in the Mirror – be brutally honest with yourself about your own characteristics, capabilities and future potential. Everything flows from those at the helm, and it can be extremely difficult to receive honest feedback and get an objective perspective when you are the boss. Seek out honest appraisals and opinions wherever possible – it is not just who you are, but also who people perceive you are that matters.
- Take Another Look at Your Team – you may feel that you know your current colleagues very well – that years of working with them, endless appraisals and feedback sessions and targeted training have given you the complete picture. But context matters – just because someone performs well in your current business situation does not ensure that they will perform exactly the same in the future you have planned for the business. Consider carefully how any changes will impact them and the likely outcomes of this.
- Take No One for Granted – just because you are fired up and convinced by the business future you envisage, does not mean everyone else in your company necessarily is. Take time to explain properly, answer questions, canvas opinions and encourage suggestions. You don’t want to lose key people at a crucial time.
- Filling the Talent Gaps – research thoroughly the availability of the additional talent you will need – any new venture or new direction is inherently risky; you may not find enough of the people you need who are willing to take the risk with you.
For tips on how to retain and develop high performers and high potential people, read our article ‘Developing High Performers’. To discover why you should close the gap of ‘how’ to achieve an outcome by replacing it with ‘who’ can achieve an outcome, read our article Why ‘Who’ is More Important than ‘How’. |
Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best
- Base Your Decisions on the Worst Projections – research and analyses of future opportunities or potential new markets are inevitably speculative. Especially in the current climate, almost everything in business is a moving target. Assume that you won’t be able to move as fast as you want to, that performance will not be as good as expected and that at least some of the anticipated outcomes simply will not occur at all. If your strategy can still work under these circumstances, you can be more confident.
- Defy Human Nature – we all have an inbuilt tendency to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them. Do the opposite. Deliberately seek out as much information as possible that throws a potential spanner in the works, then try to find a way around each problem. The more problems you can anticipate and the more prepared solutions you are armed with, the higher your chances of success.
- The Devil’s Advocate – find as many intelligent and talented people who disagree with you as possible. Discuss every point with them in detail, and make any adjustments or additions possible to overcome their objections. If you are subsequently able to convince them of your position, you know you have significantly shortened the odds in your favour.
- The Only Certainty is Uncertainty – with so many variables affecting even the smallest components of a business, let alone the wider market it is operating in, the only thing you can take for granted is that there will be unpredictability. Don’t be too tied to any one route, option or solution. Fix on your goals, but have as many different tools and strategies prepared in your arsenal as possible.
- Minimise Distractions – growing, expanding and diversifying a business is a critical time in the life of the business. Reduce other demands on your time and resources as much as possible during this key period to ensure that the focus and priorities remain steadfastly where they need to be. When something unexpected happens, some unforeseen problem occurs or some set-back emerges, you need to immediately have the additional capacity available to effectively and promptly deal with it.
To discover how coaching can help a growing business plus the differences between entrepreneur coaching and founder coaching, take a look at our article ‘Entrepreneur Coach vs Founder Coach’. |
Leveraged Knowledge is Key
- Don’t Reinvent the Wheel – model where you can from others who have achieved something that you need to achieve. A little time spent watching and learning pays dividends. Even if there isn’t a complete example of what you are trying to do, most of the time your overall goal can be broken down into component parts and the parts themselves modelled instead.
- Study Failure More Than Success – everyone loves reading a success story; and it is certainly true that knowing which ingredients created success in other circumstances can help you on your way to your own success. But just as important, and often more so, is knowing what contributed to failure. You can follow a map for a lovely walk which identifies the route, the water stops, the useful bridges and the short cuts, but if it fails to mark the areas where you may step on a landmine, the rest becomes superfluous.
- Seek Out Those Playing Higher Than You – surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are whenever possible. This exposes you to new perspectives and techniques, and pushes you to up your game. Those in different industries or markets may well be even more desirable – cross-pollination of solutions is one of the most powerful tools available.
- Get Ahead of the Game – anticipate where you and your team will need to be and tailor training and development accordingly. Companies tend to focus just on where skill gaps currently are, but better returns can be achieved by identifying where they are likely to be in the future. For example, with technology advancing at lightening-pace, focus on what is coming and how people will need to use and adapt to these new tools, rather than on perfecting the use of what currently exists.
- Speed is Of the Essence – the more responsive, agile and adaptable you are, the more likely you are to get ahead in the modern business world. Focus on improving core skills such as these as quickly as possible. Investing a few hours of your time advancing essential abilities such as rapid strategic decision-making, time optimisation and highly-effective people management can produce very significant returns on investment when growing a business.
For techniques to improve your negotiation skills and outcomes, read our article ‘5 Successful Negotiation Tactics’. For a quick fire list of tools for increasing clients, see our article ’30 Ways to Increase Clients’. To discover alternatives to the standard ‘pyramid shape’ corporate operational structure, read our article ‘What is the Best Company Structure?’. |
Business Consultancy & Business Coaching Services – Mary Taylor & Associates
At Mary Taylor & Associates, we deliver boutique business consultancy services and advanced business coaching sessions focused on radical business transformations. We aim to encourage significant growth, unlock hidden potential and resolve complex challenges for ambitious businesses.
Our approach extends beyond conventional business advisory and consultancy services. We incorporate, amongst other strategies, cross-industry pollination of solutions – the application of successful strategies and ideas from diverse sectors, combined with imaginative problem-solving and lateral thinking. This goes beyond small, incremental gains; it is designed to fundamentally shift your business performance and deliver those truly substantial wins. The depth and breadth of our experience ideally places us to partner with businesses looking to expand or diversify.
To understand more about what business consultancy offers, explore our article ‘What Does a Business Consultant Do?’, To learn more about what business coaching involves, read our article ‘What Does a Business Coach Do?’. To discover what management coaching is and how it differs from other coaching format, see our article ‘Management Coaching’. |
Mary Taylor brings a unique blend of expertise as a global business consultant, accredited coach, qualified corporate lawyer and psychologist specialising in organisational psychology. This multi-disciplinary background provides clients with incisive insights and strategies that deliver.
We believe in clear results and complete client satisfaction: our services are built around defined outcomes with guaranteed deliverables.
We are here to help you scale, diversify, navigate disruption and gain crystal-clear strategic direction, especially if you’re looking to gear up for rapid tech and market changes. We help ambitious businesses achieve significant growth, unlock their true potential and tackle those tough, complex challenges head-on.
Get in touch with us today to discuss your business transformation.
