Business Growth: Risks and Rewards
If you’re taking the key decisions for the business or offering advice to those who are, whether you’re a founder, CEO, on the board, or a trusted and deeply involved investor, you need to understand how growth works. Growth is vital for a business’s success in the long term, but there are different ways for businesses to grow, and they’re not all equally suitable for all companies.
In some cases, a growth project that fails could lead to the waste of some resources and some insight into how you could do better next time. In others, it could overextend your business fatally, sucking up finances and resources from established, stable sectors of your industry and leading to a total collapse.
Even in the case of a non-catastrophic failed expansion, public, visible failure can harm your brand. Closing a branch can lead to people feeling sorry or hard done by local employees who lose their jobs. If you’re an expertise-based business like an accountancy or consulting firm, a public overreach damages your brand: it makes the advice you’d give clients less trustworthy.
Planning for Success
The most important thing you can do is plan and research. There are no guarantees of success, but if you understand the challenges you’re facing, you can plan for them and nudge the odds favoring good outcomes. If you’re aiming to expand your business abroad, you need to budget for international research to help you do so effectively. Trying to do without that specialist analysis from experts in the field is the worst kind of economy. , BreakiBreaking foreign markets without ensuring you fully understand that the market’s quirks, customers, trends, and regulations push bullish confidence across the border into arrogance.
The Benefits
If you research and avoid the pitfalls, growth has more benefits than you might think. The initial effect is, of course, more income! More money flowing into your business is rarely a bad thing, but take here: stability. Is success fleeting? Trends move on, markets evolve, economic circumstances change, and what was once popular and sought after can become ignored and shunned, drying up your revenue stream. If you carry more pride in money and markets to other groups, you’re not dependent on a single factor for your continued survival. You can endure changing circumstances because you have multiple revenue streams from other sources, leading to true, long-term success.
