Growing pains, growing gains: that’s the reality of business.

If you’ve found success so far, trying to figure out the next step isn’t always simple. Get it wrong, and you could end up dragging your business backward. So what’s the best way to expand?

Here are some ideas on the next steps for your growing business.

Evaluate Your Current Success

Growth builds on past successes. A perfect growth strategy, then, is to take a look backward.

It may seem counter-intuitive to focus on the past, but figuring out what you’ve done so right to get to this point can drive the way you grow in the future. It could be a particular product that landed well with customers, or a marketing campaign that delivered astonishing ROI.

Whatever the case, recycling these ideas in a new form can lead to deeper market penetration, providing exciting new opportunities for growth.

Establish a Growth Plan

Growing your business definitely isn’t the time to start winging it. Your expansion strategy should be meticulous and detailed, controlling for the risks and variables.

Growth is a fraught time for a business. While you can’t guarantee success, you can mitigate risks. By controlling risk, you reduce the chances that it’ll all backfire.

Your budget and cash flow will form the natural bedrock of your growth plan. From there, you can figure out what growth looks like and how to manage it, whatever the method.

Expand Your Reach

Like most things, businesses need space to grow. If you’ve capped out the physical or digital limits of your business, then it’s time to make space for growth to happen.

The most obvious and classic example is to expand your premises. That could mean moving to a larger building, adding more local sites, or expanding to other cities. Whatever the case, the very act of creating space to grow often helps to drive it.

The caveat, of course, is that you’ll first need to figure out if it’s your limits that hold you back. If not, expanding won’t drive growth by itself. Your planning and evaluation stages should make it clear whether expanding is right for you.

Develop New Products

Developing new products can hit “difficult second album” territory for a business, but it’s often essential for growth. Even the best products can become staid and unexciting over time and many products don’t have an infinite lifespan.

Innovating then becomes a key method for growth. It’s risky, but drawing on your past successes and keeping in close touch with your audience is the best way to build a product that works.

Consider Franchising

If you have the name and you have the success, you could be poised to establish a successful franchise. Some of the biggest names of the business world are franchises (hi, McDonald’s!) and they got that way despite their humble origins.

Franchising doesn’t come without its complications, but you can find more information here about franchising and how to manage it.

Nurturing Your Growing Business

These steps should give you some ideas on how you can bring a new wave of success to your growing business. There are no guarantees, but a detailed strategy and a solid idea of where you’re going are sure to improve your chances.

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