A growth strategy involves more than simply envisioning long-term success. If you don’t have a tangible plan, you may actually be increasing the chance of losing business to competitors.
As such, it is key to be deliberate, figure out the rate-limiting step in your growth, and pour as much fuel on the fire as possible. But for this to be beneficial, you may need to take the following strategies into account. (1) Don’t just charge in – make careful deliberations James Hind, the founder of carwow, is a great advocate of sharing growth strategies. While being renown for suggesting success can be measured by whether you can achieve the standards set by competitors – and that benchmarking is an important process of business growth – he recently suggested that rushed decisions would only impede your scaling endeavour. He said: “It’s extremely important not to rush ahead and jump the gun when trying to scale, because that ultimately leads to mistakes and can be counter-productive to your growth goals.” When it came to carwow, Hind revealed that he knew prior to its launch that success in the market would rely on getting the right product to the right people one step at a time. Had the team launched all its manufacturers at once, it may have ended up having a negative impact on any future growth attempts. “So, we launched Volkswagen first, sold 400 and got that working smoothly over a year,” Hind explained. “Once visitors could use the platform without any signs of a glitch, we launched Audi and nearly doubled the volume of sales within a few months. We kept this progressive rollout approach going until we had all of the brands on the site that we were aiming for.” (2) Try your hand at franchising From drawing up a financial disclosure document to figuring out what potted plants will line the storefront, when turning a business into a franchise the devil is in the details. The pay off, however, can be lucrative, as franchising is one of the best ways to spread a brand and grow a business quickly. In fact, the British Franchise Association found that commercial failure rates for franchises are “incredibly small relative to failure rates for SMEs generally”.Read more on growth strategies:
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Statistics released by the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) showed the complex regulations around tax, VAT and compliance that surround the export process often seems onerous to SMEs – especially for those trading for the first time. The situation is compounded by the fact that the rules around exporting vary from one market to another. Catherine Raines, UK Trade & Investment’s (UKTI) CEO, explained that it comes as no surprise then that several companies hesitate before taking the export plunge. She added, however, that there was nothing for SMEs to fear. “Some 85 per cent of organisations that have worked with UKTI said that exporting led to a level of growth otherwise not possible, whilst 73 per cent said that it increased the commercial lifespan of products or services. “Firms that choose to export also report a 34 per cent boost in productivity in the first year, while the SMEs already exporting achieve 59 per cent faster productivity growth than non-exporters.”
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Here’s how car buying platform Carwow is making showrooms and haggling a thing of the past
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