Create New Opportunities By Expanding Your Reach
When your business is successful, it’s natural to look for new opportunities. If your success has been restricted to a single region, the obvious path to growth is to try to replicate that success elsewhere. There are many ways how to expand your business nationally. Some are better-suited for certain industries and organizations, but all involve an element of risk.
Maximizing opportunity and minimizing risk requires doing your research beforehand and making informed choices. Here’s a quick guide to some of the more popular ways how to expand your business nationally as well as some things to think about early in the planning stages.
Online Sales
Adding a second — or third, fourth, and so on — location to your business can involve a considerable amount of risk. Some questions to ask yourself include:
- Will I be able to divide my time between multiple locations?
- Will I be comfortable delegating authority and day-to-day decision-making to someone else?
- Will the market support a second location?
Many of today’s most iconic businesses started with a single location and grew store by store over time. When you’re ready to take the leap, a second location is a natural way to grow.
Franchising
Franchising your business is an alternative to adding more locations that gives you the potential to grow nationally with less risk. With a franchise, your partners will be motivated to succeed and will ideally bring local knowledge that will help your business thrive in new territories.
However, franchising has its downsides. You will lose some control over operations, and your success will be contingent on finding the right people to partner with. Additionally, franchised businesses are less flexible and adaptive, as it is more difficult to make global changes to policies, branding, and more.
Things to Consider as Your Business Grows
Before you expand your business, it’s beneficial to consider whether or not your current operation is running as efficiently as possible. Conduct a thorough audit of your processes to look for inefficiencies and other warning signs. Any attempt to replicate your business model on a national scale is unlikely to thrive if you don’t have these fundamental issues sorted out first.
New territories bring new challenges, so it’s important to ask the right questions. Do you have the proper licenses to sell your product or service in a proposed new location? What will the tax implications be? Will the demographics of the area be conducive to your success? How is the region changing and what will it look like five, ten, or twenty years down the road? If you can’t answer these questions with confidence, you may not be prepared to expand yet.
Technology and Business Growth
Technology has made it easier to grow a business than ever before. Beyond the potential of online sales, tools such as VoIP, cloud collaboration, and video conferencing make it easy to communicate and coordinate efforts between people separated by geographic distance.
AccessDirect has tools for franchise businesses, multi-location businesses, and online vendors. Get in touch today to learn how we can help make growth less painful for your organization with a virtual phone system.
