The business world is enormous. Many companies come and go. However, few of them make an astounding revenue. Research claims that only one-tenth of 1% of companies will ever reach $250 million in annual revenue. In simpler terms, most businesses start small and manage to stay there. But chances of excelling performance is rare.
Companies appoint experienced marketers to make successful transactions in future business. Few exemplary companies started small. However, they reached a fully—thriving large company.
A proclaimed entrepreneur and former Inc. 500 CEO, Keith McFarland, wrote in his book, The Breakthrough Company, “There are a lot of books out there written on how to run a big company. But I could not find even one book that is written on how to maintain fast-growth over a long time.” In such cases, general learning comes from the companies itself. They help you create a growth strategy of your own.
Develop a Growth Strategy: Intensive Growth
For small scale businesses, especially start-ups, need a gradual moving strategy that helps them in their intensive growth. Growth strategies are like a ladder. You can’t climb all at once. It is a process. The main focus remains to keep moving. There are various stages through which the strategy goes. They are as follows:
1) Penetrate in the market: The most risk-free strategy for any business is to sell more of its product and services to its already existing customers. Companies need to understand not just one requirement of their clients but as many as possible. This way, they can sneak into the various levels of serving the clients by linking one product to multiple uses.
2) Market development: Another feature is to strategize market development. The market includes people of the same city, same country, same continent, and of course the same world. When companies receive a positive response from clients, they must aim to spread out services to a more substantial sum of people. This will allow your business to hold a global existence. Every brand that is globally available and known was once serving a limited geographical space.
3) Multi-channels: It is essential to join hands with multiple channels, to grow the scope of your business. This eases the process of pursuing the decision makers or target customers in different ways, such as selling a product online. For instance, when Apple launched a new product, it went online and adopted alternate channels. This helped the customers experience the new product through software. It boosted the sales as the apple customers appreciated it.
4) Product development: Many companies believe in developing new products and services and aim at selling it to the existing clients. This saves them from a high risk of falling flat. It is a classic strategy to involve old customers with new products.
Develop a Growth Strategy: Integrative Growth
Companies seek growth of all kinds, intensive and integrative both. The difficulty lies that some 75% of actions fail to deliver the expected efficiencies that were predicted. To recover from that, companies apply intensive as well as integrative strategies. There are viable alternatives to be implemented in an integrative growth strategy. They are as follows:
1) Horizontal Integrative Strategy: This strategy helps in growing business by merging a competing business. It eliminates any future competition and also gives a sturdy foundation to your organization. Many big companies have acquired their critical competitors as the perfect shortcut to market expansion and product development in the industry.
2) Backward Integrative Strategy: It involves overtaking one of your suppliers to have better control of the supply chain. This step helps to develop new products at much ease. It is cost-effective too. For instance, a company named Fastenal is based in Winona that trades in selling nuts and bolts has decided to acquire several tools as a way to launch custom-part manufacturing as an aim to expand the business.
3) Forward Integrative Strategy: This strategy contains the distribution chain where companies buy retail stores as a mode of cutting down future competition in the market at their own expense. This strategy is put with a motive to push the manufacturing, supply, and sales all at once.
Concluding Note:
The question for any businessman is how to benefit from the business. Business growth strategies involve not just selling products and services. Feedback plays a pivotal role, too, in business growth. Very often, companies take years to develop strategies to identify the market, prepare a plan, and implement. These various kinds of policies exist for the cause of intensive growth or integrative growth, which is helpful in the aim of building business for the long-term.
