Growth Success Without Potential Waste

One of the long term things that every business owner must think about is growth. 

Growth is the expansion of your business to the next level.  This could mean expanding your business to include more products, to do more things, or to grow physically by adding more locations.

Growth is what holds the potential for the most success in the long term.  An entrepreneur can find many benefits for themselves if they can manage to grow carefully, without going too far or stretching too thin too fast. 

If that sounds difficult to do, it can be.  Many businesses have failed by expanding too quickly and not having enough of the market share to hold them together.  On the other hand, there are plenty of businesses out there that have not grown as much as they could and now are missing out on the potential larger profit margin.

It’s Personal Too

Of course, the growth of your business is a personal choice.  Not everyone can determine where they lie here at the beginning of their business as well.  Yet, one thing is sure.

Your growth potential has a lot to do with your security in your business.  If you have trust and assurance that your business is a business worth existing, then by all means you can grow.  If you are not sure and can not make decisions regarding the growth of your business, it can not possibly grow.

Although most people are ready and willing to take full advantage of an opportunity to build on what they have created, others are quite willing to let the pieces fall as they may.

One principle that you need to remember, then, is that to become successful in your business, you need to determine your level of security in risk.  What are you comfortable with and how can you insure that what you are doing is what will pay off in the long term?

These are hard questions to answer but they must be done.

Growing Too Fast

One of the worst things that you can do for your business is to grow too fast.  If you do not have the assets and the cash flow to back up this type of major expansion, you may find yourself facing a number of problems just maintaining your business rather than worrying about expanding it.

The risk of failure due to over expanding too quickly is that you just may not be able to handle the obligations of several locations or such a large corporation.  Many of the larger corporations that have faced this have fallen through because of the enormous expense of taking on another building, another payroll, another unit.

Yet, the smaller business owner does not face this huge number of risks as the larger corporation.  But!

It is important to make sure that you invest wisely in growth and not without investing time first.  Determining where your potential benefits are is the first key to success.  In addition, a good look at what the possibilities are is in order.

Are You Ready To Grow?

Those that are interested in finding the right solution in the terms of growth are doing the right thing.  Remember though that it is important to make a decision in the right frame of mind and with the right amount of research done first.

In terms of growing, what the right choice is happens to be up to you individually.  Ask these questions of your success:

1.     Does your business have the cash flow to support not only this functioning location (or your current business) as well as another?

2.     If you are expanding, what makes you believe that this expansion will serve your business well? 

3.     What is the likely expense of growing and does the business have the necessary means to protecting and covering that cost?

All of these things are crucial to your business’s success in the growth factor.  But, you also need to insure that you do not limit your growth with not enough opportunity either.

Don’t Limit It

The mistake of many business owners is that they do not put their foot out there and expand fast enough or at all.  While it is essential not to move too fast, it is just as important to consider if you are moving just too slow for benefit either.

To understand this factor, you again need to turn to your business.  Are you getting all that you can from it?  Can you do more or get a better bottom line if you do grow in some shape? 

To learn the right amount of growth for your business, you can do test market studies, invest in surveys, or just start slowly and work up to it.  The amount that you put into your business is really up to you and to how well the business has been doing to this point.

A bad business that is not doing well in one location may not be able to do well elsewhere either.

A good business that is thriving may be hindered by not moving it.

Of course, the opposite is true too.  Research is the best way to determine where growth stands in your business.