How to Grow and Expand Your Small Business to New Locations

Looking to grow and expand your business into new locations? It takes courage to strive for more, but doing it right requires something else.

Blind courage without knowledge often results in failure. That’s why you’re here.

In this article, we will cover what you need to grow and expand your small business.

So if that sounds interesting, which it should – keep reading to learn more.

Cash Flow Semantics

Opening a new location requires financial investment. So base your decisions on data-driven projection, don’t be a guesser. Figure out a possible time frame, in which your new location can generate enough revenue to fund the operation, and continue doing so without further investment.

Do you have enough cash reserves to fund the operation until it becomes self-sufficient? Even if your first location is profitable, it might not be generating enough revenue to support the second location, especially if the latter does not achieve your forecast metrics.

Do you have any other financing options at a cost that will ensure the success of the new location?

Invest In What Already Works

One of the most significant issues that business owners have is diversifying too much. If something is working, double down on it. When expanding to new locations, business owners often fail to replicate the processes of the first business, which made it successful in the first place.

Document all of your business processes, learn how to replicate them, and ensure that the entire team for the new location is aware of them.

Market Research

Another issue that many business owners come across when trying to grow and expand is the lack of research for their new market. Without research, one cannot make realistic projections.

Expanding to a new location takes up your time and your money, so it’s pretty risky to just go off of a gut feeling. Even some of the largest brands have failed when trying to expand to markets that they knew nothing about. And with your limited resources, don’t follow in their failures.

Ensure that you have conducted research thoroughly, and figured out if demand for the product/service is quantifiable. Tailor the new location to the unique character of the market, don’t think that everything that worked there will work here.

Retain the Culture

One of the challenging aspects of expanding to a new location is making sure that your brand culture is still present. You want to make sure that your employees and customers are connected to the values and mission of the brand.

There are many, many ways to go about this, so don’t stress too much over it. You can start by relocating, and heading up the new location. You can train your employees deliberately, and spend personal time with them – teaching and developing the culture within them.

Communicate with the entire company often, and make sure to involve everybody. Or, how about hosting a company retreat once a year?

Grow And Expand Brand Power

A critical faculty of expansion is recognition. To do that, you need to have considerable brand power. Whatever business you are running, it’s a brand.

Any brand that is competing for work and clients with other multinational companies should consider having branch offices and locations, which resemble the entire premise of the business.

Not to mention that the competitive and operational advantages of second locations are significant, but the value that it will add to your brand is not to be underestimated. Brands rule the world, and if you want to order your market, you might as well let everybody know that you exist, and that’s best done by exposure. The more present you are, the easier it is to spot you.

Defined Objectives

With any business venture, it’s particularly important to have defined objectives. Notably, before you go into expansion mode.

Start by asking yourself:

1. Is our goal to satisfy customer demand or integrate into new markets?
2. Are we looking to access new talent? Do we have proper training/hiring resources?
3. Are we looking to empower our brand, will the intangible outweigh the investment?
4. Are we looking to satisfy existing demand? Have we thought about other solutions besides expansion?

Questions don’t hurt, but they certainly help. So don’t be afraid to ask questions that will make you reconsider the entire process. Just do it with due diligence, and all shall be well.

Compliance

Whether your location is a new country, state, city, or area, you have to make sure that your service/product abides by all local regulation of that relevant jurisdiction.

In addition to that, ensure that the new location is compliant with taxation, business structure, and other semantics. Intellectual property, trademarks, all of that has to be registered, especially if you are looking to expand into a new country.

Expansion is quite literally that. Whatever you’ve been doing now, you have to do more of it, and better. Check out this guide for shipping from Mexico, which might be of interest if you’re looking to outsource products.

Expansion Done Right

Now that you know in the premise how to grow and expand your business, you are well on your way to building up the brand and showing why your enterprise matters.

There’s no wrong way to go about growing your business. However, there are practical and ineffective methods, which lead to plausible and implausible results.

So you decide what it’s going to be, a failure or a success. If you’re interested in other business topics, check out our in-depth articles on one of the category pages.