If your business is enjoying a period of sustained success, you might find it easier to consider the question of building on your success and expanding easier to swallow. You might find it a little bit more tempting as well.
Not to burst your bubble though – but expansion can be a fatal error for some businesses, and for others, a move can leave them stuck in the doldrums for years until they enjoy the same success as before.
With expansion, sometimes it can be a case of counting your blessing and enjoying success rather than seeking to embark on a flawed plan to capitalize on it.Every business should look to seek success, and when they are enjoying success, they should look to find ways to make the most out of it. This doesn’t necessarily mean to expand, though.
Expansion is something that needs to face at the very least a rudimentary level of questioning. It could be a big error if a move isn’t questioned. This isn’t to be a party pooper, and questioning exciting moves can be seen as a bit boring, but it’s worth taking the wheels off a failing project before it actually gets moving.
If your business is chafing, there are plenty of ways to expand that don’t involve opening up in a new location – you could start collaborating, hosting more events – just using your success to get your name out there more is a great way to ‘expand’.
Sometimes, expansion is necessary though. If an office can’t keep up with demand, success can turn to failure in an instant. That’s not good. If expansion and opening a new location are demanded by performance and business needs, you need to ensure that you nail it.
When you identify a suitable location and arrange the requirements to be met for a move to take place, that is when the real work begins.You need to get your office furniture and fitouts installed as soon as possible, you need to hire staff such as cleaners and additional workers to get the site operational and functional.
No matter if you are expanding or relocation, you are going to need an excellent administration team on site to help you transition – you should be sprinting out of the blocks here, not stumbling to a stop.
Your business needs the new site to be as operational and functional as the current place of business – anything less should be considered a failure and might hold your business back and reduce the expansion dream to an expansion scream.
That’s the worst case scenario though, but it has to be said that the better the new site works on opening day, the more chance that this move will work out for you. The impact of any issues lessens if your business isn’t customer facing.
The right time to expand is when every check returns positive. You need the cash, the legal documents and the right plan to all be in order before a move can even be truly considered. The right time to consider it? When your business clearly needs it – and at no other point.