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Seven Ways To Prepare Your Business For Expansion

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Expansion|Seven Ways To Prepare Your Business For ExpansionKnowing when and how to take your business to the next level is an important skill for any business owner, whether you own a startup or a nationally recognised company. If you’re successful in your current market but feel like you need more of a challenge, expanding nationally or internationally needs careful strategy planning. Put your business through these top tips to get it expansion ready.

  1. Set attainable goals for your business. Make sure these goals are specific and measurable, such as taking on five new accounts by the end of the financial year, or increasing revenue by $1million in the next six months. Goals you can measure can be tracked so you know if you’re on track to meet target or if you’ll need to push harder to reach them. Set out a plan. How will you get from your current position to the goal?
  2. Can your company manage the growth? Do you have the capacity to manage the planned growth? Can you afford it? Do you have enough staff or will you need to bring in more? Can your suppliers meet a higher demand? Is your office large enough to cope with more staff? Make sure the answer to all these questions is yes before you start to grow.
  3. Do you have the right management in place? You need someone at the reins who is ambitious, driven and capable of taking your business into a larger market. Like Tully Rinckey, consider bringing in a new CEO or other management who can help you to grow. Look for people with experience in growing business who can advise and steer the ship successfully.
  4. Don’t be afraid to adjust the plans. You’ll inevitably learn more as your business grows. The industry may change, or the market may shift direction. Be ready to respond and adjust targets and plans to get there if you need to. There’s no point in sticking hard to a goal that is no longer relevant. It’s important to be flexible.
  5. Be realistic about your company. Are you already established in your field and working successfully? If not, don’t try to grow too early. Focus instead on becoming an established recognised name at your level. Growing too fast won’t help you at all. Is there a demand for what you do? You can’t grow if there’s not enough demand for your business. Some businesses just work better small, and that doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
  6. Does your company owe money? Debt can snowball easily, so before concentrating on expansion try to clear or pay down as much debt as you can. A fresh slate will make growth much easier. A debt snowball method can help you to cut down your debts easily.
  7. Are you already growing? If you’re experiencing steady growth each year, with an increase in demand for your business, this is an excellent sign that it’s time to take things up a notch. Expand with more staff to take on a higher demand for your work and keep things profitable. If you’re not growing, it’s probably not the right time to expand.

Boost Your Business With License Plating

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |License Plating|Boost Your Business With License PlatingDoes your business entail supply management on a large scale? Do you think your company can still grow if only you have better infrastructure and more manpower to handle the workload? Do you have concrete plans for your business, but is hindered by budget constraints? Perhaps you would like to consider improving your current processes, employing better supply management practices, and adopting modern technology.

With that it mind, you should check out and learn more about license plating. Yes, the same practice you’ll find in vehicle registration also works great with supply management. Simply put, license plating lets you intelligently manage a batch of items, taking them as a single unit. The assigned plates determine the batch/unit, and it improves the efficiency of your warehouse operations, streamlining inventory transfer within the supply chain.

Can this really improve my business?

Imagine this: you’ve been managing your supply the same way throughout the years. The process, assuming you have one in place, follows several steps from one point in your supply chain to another. If you can introduce a better, more efficient way to do things, you can take out several steps in that process and move your products faster from your end to your consumers. It’s not really a question of “will it work,” because it will make your existing supply management process work better. Say for example you have a diverse supply to take care of. You can assign a “container” for these, either by pallet, carton, truck, or a large freight box. These are then assigned license plate numbers and use this information to group the items for easier management.

Get a snapshot of the information that matters

The license plates assigned are unique for your business. You can customize it however you want. By “customized,” we mean adding the associated information on the plates, including the item type, quantity, part numbers, serial number, manufacture date, expiration date, and more. You can add all of these and more, as necessary, to make tracking and grouping your items easier. By using the license plates, you’re simplifying the handling process by eliminating the need to distinguish on the item or product level.

You get more freedom to customize as you see fit, and you can choose to have a barcode or RFID tag for scanning purposes. From these alone, you can see how free you are to customize your supply chain based on your specific requirements.

Other Benefits

With license plating in place, you’ll be able to receive your shipments faster, track them for better response times, and adjust accordingly when problems arise. You can group items in “kits” for better packing and unpacking, depending on the supply needs or your customer requirements. If you’re working with raw materials, you can create license plates for every part you need and group them based on the order. You can also manage the consumption of materials, to ensure that you don’t over or undersupply. You can easily view inventory balances through the plates, so that you can adjust in real-time and avoid any downtimes and other similar issues.