Must You Scrap Your Business to Make It Bigger?
By Desty on Sep 10, 2007 in Blog Business, Meta Business
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How do you know if your business will grow? Can your business grow?
When the business is first created and its plan is formed, this is the critical time to think about the future. Most new business owners think only of the “now” and put off planning the future. While the planning of start-up operations is a highly critical phase of planning, some attention needs to be placed on expansion of future operations.
What Would You Do With a Million Dollars?
There’s an easy way to check the future of your business. Imagine that instead of making $1200 per month, you’re making $12000 per month or even $120000 per month. Now what happens? Think about your current operations; what would you have to be doing to make $120000 per month? Is your business like a pipeline, where all you have to do is fit in a larger pipe? Or, rather, is your business like Lucy and the pie factory, where you’re the only one on the line and the faster the pies come out, the faster they fall in the floor?
My original eBay sales business would have had me, at first, rushing to catch those pies as they came screaming down the line. I had to order product as I would make a sale, catalog, sort, and reship product to customers with each order. One day I had 5 sales of 5 different products, 2 of which were large items. It was not fun trying to carry everything out to the shipper.
How to Expand Your Business
There are two major ways to make your business more efficient and put it on the fast track for expansion:
- Business System
- Hire More Personnel
Look at your current business plan. Where can you make changes to the system to make it more efficient? Where I made a change was contacting my suppliers and setting up drop shipments. That simple change made a world of difference; no longer did I have to wait for replacement products to arrive so I could ship. The supplier would ship products directly to my customers. It was a huge boost to my customers in that shipping costs were halved and total time from order to delivery was reduced by atleast 1 week.
After making your business systems as streamlined as possible, it’s time to expand your business and hire some help. Despite what you think, you CAN’T do it all, not with business pouring in. Start by contacting your local temp agency. Check into the costs involved to hire a temp; if your business doesn’t make enough revenue to hire some help, even on a part-time basis, look again at your business plan to see if there is any further changes you can make to squeeze out some more efficiency.
How Does This Help Me, the Blogger?
It’s my opinion that you should never totally outsource content creation for your flagship blog. Offering guest spots for writers in exchange for promotion is one cost free way to expand your blog, however you should have tight reins on what goes onto your blog. While someone else wrote the article, it’s your rep. that’s on the line. Go over the submitted article with a fine tooth comb and ask yourself, “is this something I would want on my blog?”
Expansion of blogs could naturally turn into a 2nd blog or the creation of a blog network. Bringing writers in on staff for a blog network expands your business, as long as they are writing on separate blogs; as said earlier, keep a tight control of your own blog. If the network were to fail, you should be able to keep your original blog at its original status.
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