One of the key goals for any business is to achieve sustainable and prolonged growth. Put simply, larger companies that enjoy significant and multiple revenue streams can face economic uncertainty and a challenging business landscape with more confidence than smaller firms.
Larger businesses may be able to enjoy economies of scale in production and distribution. These can reduce the unit cost of each product and can help to maximize profitability.
However, it can be difficult to ascertain when to grow your business and which functions should expand. There may be opportunities to enter new international markets, either by creating a new headquarters in foreign markets or simply by improving your business website to support international sales. A key consideration for any business growth strategy is that it should be well planned and have a high probability of ongoing success.
In this article, some top tips for business expansion will be explored. They include information relating to outsourcing, transitioning to cloud-based services, improved web design, and the use of business intelligence platforms to drive strategic decision-making. These tips may be of value to a wide range of businesses in many different sectors of industry.
Investigate outsourcing
Achieving business growth and expansion traditionally meant taking on new permanent staff and creating new teams or even whole new departments. This method of expansion has a significant cost implication. Taking on a range of permanent staff will significantly add to the wage budget of a firm, and a business will need to be sure that there’s sufficient demand for new staff over the long term.
However, businesses can take on external specialist staff (or even new departments) by a process known as outsourcing. Put simply, outsourcing is a business practice whereby external staff are hired on a temporary or contracted basis via a third-party supplier of labor. For example, a growing business may need to rely on a dedicated finance department to support its increasing activities. Instead of hiring new staff, the finance function can be outsourced to a third-party provider.
These services allow a business to gain access to highly skilled specialist staff who use the latest technology. They’re only employed for as long as they’re needed; for example, specialist staff may be outsourced for a specific project (such as creating a business website) and then no longer used once the project is completed. This allows businesses to grow while keeping a tighter control on expenditure in the form of staffing costs.
Also Read: Navigating Financial Growth: A Comprehensive Guide to Business Loans
Move to the cloud
Cloud-based platforms and business applications can play a key role in supporting business growth. Many modern cloud-based systems are more efficient than older, locally based systems and can help a company to work more productively whilst lowering costs. There’s no need for expensive local server maintenance and a remote workforce can be cultivated that doesn’t need to be based in a physical corporate premises.
However, while cloud-based systems undoubtedly support business growth, they need to be constructed intelligently to maximize their security and efficiency. Multiple cloud applications will require the business to invest in a high-performing api gateway. This is a vital addition to any cloud infrastructure and helps to manage traffic and communication across cloud-based applications.
A key feature of an effective API gateway is the protection it gives businesses from the acts of cyber criminals. A successful cyberattack can cost businesses an average of $200,000 per incident and this can severely restrict plans for future growth. API gateways help to create a secure point of access to business systems with effective monitoring of traffic and application requests.
Enhance your website
If your business plans to aim for increased sales, a key way to achieve this is by improving your company website. A high-performing business website that obeys the best practices of search engine optimization (SEO) can help a business to grow 15–50% more rapidly than a company that doesn’t have this feature.
However, it’s incredibly important to ensure that alongside the latest SEO techniques, your web pages load quickly to minimize the risk of customers visiting your site and leaving after viewing just one page. Web page loading times have a direct link to the bounce rate of a webpage. Typically, most visitors won’t navigate further on a site that has a page loading speed of more than a few seconds. The business website must perform well across multiple tech devices and allow international sales to be supported by using location-specific pricing.
Also Read: Great Tips to Make Your Business More Eco-Friendly: From Renewable Materials to Green Energy
Decision-making and BI platforms
As a final, brief example of supporting business growth, decisions that shape the future direction of a company should be based on high-quality data and information. Businesses in all sectors should use a business intelligence platform to transform corporate, strategic, and market data into actionable insights.
BI platforms can take high volumes of complex data from multiple sources and produce information that allows managers to make informed decisions. In short, this technology can help to reduce uncertainty in strategic decision-making, thus improving the success of activities that foster business growth.
