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The Different Ways Your Business Can Grow

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Growth is essential for any business. If you’re not looking at ways that you can grow, you’re at risk of being overtaken by competitors who have more ambitious plans. There are lots of different ways a business can grow, however not every form of growth is suitable for every business. Today we’re taking a look at some of the ways your business can grow to ensure its long-term survival and success!

Exploring New Markets

One of the most popular ways for businesses to grow is to bring their successful model and products to new markets, filled with fresh customers.

It’s easy to see why this is an attractive option: it simply requires you replicate the business model that has worked for you in the past, in a new area, or even a new country. You have to beware if you’re looking at taking your business into international markets though. Not only do different countries have different laws that might affect your business, their consumers behave differently. You need to work with an international research company to make sure you know what those international consumers are looking for, and what about your brand you can expect them to value, to make sure your marketing campaign speaks to them as effectively as possible.

Adding New Products

Another way you can grow your offering is to add new products to your store, whether it’s online or in a bricks and mortar building.

Diversifying what you offer has lots of advantages: as well as giving your customers a fresh reason to be excited in your business, and perhaps bringing more people to your door, the more products make up your revenue stream the less dependent you are on any one of them. Whether it’s a change in financial circumstances or the trends governing customer behaviour, a product can become unavailable, or untenable at any moment. The broader the base of your offering, the safer you are when a product or product group loses its appeal.

Growing at Home

If you don’t want to expand into new markets or change what you’re offering, you’re left with the marketing challenge of broadening your appeal in your home market. This is the best choice for a smaller, younger business with plenty of untapped potential in the market surrounding them – it’s bigger businesses that have to radically reinvent themselves to find new customers.

You might want to work with a market research firm to help find the best way to spread the message of your company, and ensure you’re speaking to the biggest possible market for what you have to offer.

Innovation Labs and Their Link to Business Growth

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Innovation is absolutely essential to the growth of any organization. It was Albert Einstein himself who said that anyone who continue to do what they have always done will never get anything other than what they already have. Innovation is also not something only large organizations need to think about or even have the capacity to do. While it is certainly true that those with the bigger budgets also have the bigger innovation labs, some of which are actually purpose-built, even the smallest organization in the world can have a semblance of an innovation lab.In fact, all organizations must focus on this.

Innovation Labs Are Key to the Success of an Organization

Businesses with huge budgets sometimes have a full innovation department or even separate innovation labs. Google is an example of this, but so is Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and so on. It is certainly true that the small mom and pop store down the road does not have the capacity to build a department of this size or to invest as much money into developing ideas that are most likely going to be pipe dreams. However, every business can put at least some time aside for people to come together and think innovatively, coming up with new ideas that can drive the organization forward.  whether this is done in a separate building somewhere and Silicon Valley or around a desk in a corner shop makes no difference.

All organizations, no matter what size they are, should make innovation of priority. Running innovation workshops is an ideal way to do this. Unfortunately, in corporate environments, there is still a lack of space and place for innovation. The main resource that has to be allocated however, is time. People need to have time outside of their regular workload to come up with ideas, and this is not something that should be done as an afterthought. It is something that will actually drive the success of the business as a whole. That is worth making time for.

It is heartening to see that more and more companies are now taking part in innovation training. This shows that they truly are interested in the potential and the creativity that each of their employees can bring. It recognizes that individuals have their own sets of competencies, processes, talents, knowledge, and more. By focusing on innovation, a business starts to take a holistic approach towards generating more profits. It also starts to develop a true vision in terms of where the business wants to go and how it will get there.

Innovation is difficult. Embracing innovation itself is already a form of innovation. It means changing an existing culture and that is perhaps the most difficult thing to do in any business. Again, it doesn’t matter how old that business is, what size it is, what its budget is, or where it ranks on the Fortune 500 list. Doing things differently, which is what innovation is, is always difficult. But equally, it is an absolute necessity.