When growing your business, there are several important factors that you need to consider. One of the most important decisions to make is how you actually plan to grow your company. The first choice is via digital means such as adding new payment systems, growing your social media presence and upgrading your website. The second choice is to grow your business physically such as expanding your office, moving to a new location or even adding an extra store.
Out of these suggestions, growing your business by adding a new location is incredibly complex and takes a lot of knowledge and planning. However, it’s also one of the best ways to take your business to the next level. To make it a little easier for you, we’ve put together a list of considerations to keep in mind before you add a new business location to your brand.
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Consider your financial situation
It sounds obvious, but you should only ever expand if you have enough capital. Your current business needs to be doing well without financial troubles before you would even consider expanding to another location. Sit down with your financial advisor and an accountant to discuss expansion plans and how much capital you’ll need to do it safely. You may also want to speak with top architecture firms like Pond to get a rough idea of how much money you’ll be spending to actually expand. There are more considerations such as the hiring of staff and increasing your marketing budget to account for the new location, so make sure you discuss this with a competent accountant and advisor.
Thinning Your Resources
It’s good to keep in mind that during the initial setup of your new location, you’re going to be spreading your resources rather thinly. The key to remember is that you’re not going to hire an entirely new set of staff to run your location. You’ll most likely be transferring staff from one location to another, such as senior members or possibly promoting current employees to managerial roles in the new location. As such, you need to hire a variety of employees to cover the new location. To make the transition smoother, you may need to convince current employees to move over to the new location and this needs to be enticing for them, or they will reject your offers.
Do You Really Need To?
Expanding to a new location could ultimately become the death of your business. Thinning out your resources by spreading employees around and diverting funds to power the new location could result in a negative impact on your successful business. If you don’t feel like there is demand for your business in other areas, then there is little reason to actually expand. Consider the viability first before you start investing capital into the expansion of your company.
I hope these considerations have given you plenty to ponder. Growing your company is inevitable for success, but expanding the number of locations you own doesn’t have to be the only way.
