As entrepreneurs, whoever doesn’t want to expand one’s business? Once you are over the initial turbulent phase of launching your business successfully, it is only natural to consider expansion.
Expanding is risky. However, if you plan well and it pays off, you will be seeing yourself making great leaps in terms of your revenue.
But once you start expanding your business you have to be aware of few challenges and be ready to tackle them. This is necessary otherwise it could lead to heavy losses and a potential wind-down.
In this post I would like to share with you a few prominent challenges any expanding business needs to handle well.
1. Need to be More Vigilant
A small-scale business might not attract too much public scrutiny. However, once you are doing well and expand, things change. In this era of fast-paced, real-time social media, your customers, employees, vendors and investors etc. are constantly bound to watch your operations and deliverables.
You would soon find that you need to step very carefully to avoid any negative criticism from several of these factions. Even a simple mistake could prove very costly when you really start expanding your business.
Besides running watertight operations, you would need to ensure you have a professional staff of PR which is geared to handle all internal and external communications.
2. Need to tackle Unethical Competition
This can be a big cause of concern, especially in the apparels retail industry. Once you have made a mark for yourself with your high quality of merchandise, chances are some unethical competitors might try leveraging upon your goodwill by offering fake brands imitating your products.
Such fake products can seriously jeopardize your reputation and affect your future sales. So, it becomes critical to have a legal cell in place to monitor such untoward activities from unethical competitors.
3. Need to work harder at Employee Relationships
When you have just started out your company, it is a considerably smaller team. You forge close bonds with employees and there is a high level of energy and motivation to succeed.
However, once you start getting bigger, and the number of employees you hire dramatically increase, it becomes challenging to maintain such close bond with all employees.
So, if you are expanding, make sure you work extra hard for maintain these crucial employee relationships and investing sufficient time and money in them to keep up employees’ morale and sense of belonging.
4. Need to cope with extra Stress
When you operate a small, local-level business, it is much easier to maintain your work-life balance. However, once you start expanding in a serious way, it becomes extremely challenging to take time out for family and close friends.
For most businessmen, it is no hardship. But for those for whom family life and other personal commitments matter a lot, it can be very stressful.
So, it becomes imperative to chalk out a few stress-buster strategies to be able to continue to expand successfully without it affecting your personal relationships.
In a nutshell, business expansion comes along with its host of challenges. The more prepared you are to accept and deal with them would make all the difference in how well you keep growing your business in a healthy way.