Many businesses find that they grow naturally, just by doing a good job with their current customers. Working hard to generate positive word of mouth, brand awareness and maintaining an excellent business reputation is essential in opening up opportunities for growth.
Other businesses find that they need to deliberately encourage growth through marketing, advertising and sales activities. Or, some business may find that they need to slow growth because of resource constraints, including lack of finances or the right personnel to grow the business.
Growing a business can be a very exciting and rewarding experience. It can also be very challenging and have risks you are unfamiliar with. The people, skills, resources and systems that work perfectly well for a smaller business may not be as effective when the business grows. The leadership and management skills needed to run a business in its early stages can be different from those needed to grow a business.
Growth happens differently in every business and you should prepare well before entering into a significant growth phase by considering the impacts that growth can have. How and when you want to grow your business should form part of your overall business strategy.
The impacts are likely to be on:
For a more in depth look at growing your business, go to the Small Business Tool Kit.