You're eager to expand your home-based business as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, growing too fast without establishing yourself on a solid foundation is often a recipe for disaster. Use the following growth strategies for your Home-Based Business:
Focus on your core strengths
When the dough begins to roll into your home-based business, your first inclination may be to take advantage of every opportunity in front of you while you have your target audience’s attention. Instead, focus on your core strengths and completely develop the products or services you already have in your arsenal. When trying to focus on too many unique projects at once, you run the risk of overpromising and under delivering, which can be detrimental to driving business growth. But if you take the time to focus on what you do best, supporters will remain loyal, spread the word and your home-based business can continue to flourish at a rate you can handle.
Alter your approach to customer service
Customer service should always be your top priority. To gauge if your customer service approach is effective, request feedback from customers and pay attention to what they are saying about your company online. Once you discover the areas that need improvement and make the necessary adjustments, customers will so impressed with the level of service you provide that they’ll be more than willing to recommend your business to others.
Prepare for the worst
Brainstorm a list of the worst things that could happen to your company. Create a plan for how to handle each problem and put in place any preventative measures to protect your business ahead of time. For instance, if someone copying your design is a major issue, obtain the necessary patents and educate yourself about the basics of intellectual property law. Or perhaps you live in a hurricane-prone area and fear a major storm shuttering your operations. Develop a backup plan to ensure that all of your business files are backed up to the cloud so that you can access everything remotely if your home office is damaged in the storm or you are forced to evacuate.
Hire help
If you left your business tomorrow, would it continue to thrive or be forced to cease operations indefinitely? In most instances, the latter applies if the home-based business is a one-man show. But in order to expand, you’ll eventually need to hire a contractor, freelancer, intern or virtual assistant if you want to maximize the potential in your home-based business. Otherwise, you’ll spend the bulk of your time working in your business, and not on your business. Focusing on the market expansion strategy instead of improving core strengths and competencies will hinder your business from reaching new heights.
While hiring help may seem like a stretch if your operational budget is limited, the minimal investment in your company will pay off in the long-run.
Cross promote
Partnering with other entities is another growth strategy example, it increases brand awareness and exposure of your offerings to the masses. By partnering with organizations both inside and outside of your industry to help market your products, your company will garner the attention it needs to expand beyond a small home-based business.
