Strategies for Growing Your Small Business

From marketing and finance to operations and administration, every area of your business can benefit from these time-tested growth strategies.

If you're not busy growing your business, your competitors are busy growing theirs. To keep your business competitive, creating and following a growth strategy is imperative for the 21st century entrepreneur.

Growth encompasses many areas of business. As you assess which areas of your business are ripe for expansion, consider our list of growth strategy areas.

Start Up

• Creating a Written Business Plan — If you haven't yet created a written business plan, this exercise will force you to write a general guideline for your business's growth.

Running a Business

• Knowing Your Government Contracting Opportunities — When it comes to finding new customer bases, don't forget about one of the largest in the nation: Uncle Sam.

Marketing

• Building a Successful Marketing Plan — Focusing your marketing efforts on a few (or just one) key objectives is imperative for growth success.
• Investing in Product Development — Even the most loyal customer will abandon ship if you're not properly steering your business's product development efforts while competitors are busy launching new products.
• Generating and Evaluating New Product Ideas — From idea generation to product testing methods, learn what it takes to decide which ideas are with pitching or pursuing.
• Embracing eCommerce — Your business can reach unbelievable heights by allocating time and money to your online business endeavors.

Office & HR

• Making the Decision to Hire — Bringing on your first employee can be a daunting, and expensive, undertaking. But it can also be a necessity to expanding your business.
• Knowing When It's Time to Leave the Home Office — While many businesses flourish at home, few are able to break a growth threshold.
• Making Smart Business Facility Decisions — If your booming business needs more space, keep these considerations top of mind during your real estate hunt.

Finance

• Obtaining Financing Through Franchising — The key to growth may not be opening more locations—it may be letting others open franchised locations.
• Evaluating Cost/Volume/Profit Analyses — Before you aggressively pursue growth, check your numbers and projections with these analyses.
• Considering Major Purchases and Projects — When expansion necessitates a major purchase or project, weigh the pros and cons carefully.

Taxes

• Avoiding, not Evading, Taxes — Before your business expansion unfolds, be aware of any new tax burdens related to your growth.