There comes a time that simply doing what you’ve been doing all along is no longer going to win you any more of the market, nor going to impact your revenue too dramatically. You can continue optimizing the business as is, or you can look into new ways to get the kind of growth that you need. Here, we’re going to look at examples of how you do the latter.
Target new markets
If you’re no longer able to keep maximizing your profits from your existing market, then the time may have come for you to look at winning new markets, instead. There are multiple ways to win new customers. You can take an offline business online or you can open a branch in a new location, for instance. What’s important is that you do the research and ensure that the direction you choose has enough customers to sustain the scaling effort.
Find a new niche
You don’t always have to target entirely new markets. Sometimes, you just have to be more specific in who, within that market, you are targeting. If your business finds it hard to keep competing with the others in the industry head-to-head, then instead look at the niches you can specialize in. You can end up appealing to the customers who are currently feeling left out, giving you uncontested access to new revenue.
Join forces with another business
Other businesses do not have to be competitive or nothing. They can also be assets and partners that can offer new resources and revenue to your business. This is the main purpose of mergers & acquisitions. To ensure that they go as smoothly as possible, you have to make sure that both businesses have shared goals and that you can effectively integrate their staff and their office culture into your own.
Incorporating new revenue streams for old markets
Let’s say that you currently offer a product to an existing market of customers. You sell it and support those sales, but you might not have anything to do with the customer beyond that. How do you turn one-time revenue into existing revenue? Turning a standard retail business into a subscription service, or offering supplementary services to maximize the value of those products could be two examples of how to do this.
Break into a new industry
It’s one of the hardest steps to take alone and is often instead done through mergers and acquisitions, but it’s not entirely impossible to take your business into an entirely new industry. It may mean having to do a lot of research in that industry and finding partners who can help you find your feet, but you will have the advantages of having the resources to complement the knowledge they can bring.
How your business’s growth goes forward and how you scale it will depend on what opportunities are available to you, as well as what resources you can utilize. The above list should serve as some inspiration, but you need to look more closely at what you can achieve specifically.
