When starting a business, it’s easy to forget to account for your growth path. What training, staffing, square footage and supply needs will you have in a year’s time? To help you create future-proof plans, we’ve compiled this list of key things to consider for business growth. But first, you need data. What are your sales forecasts and estimated growth rates? Once you know these numbers, you can account for the following elements.
Diversified income.
You’ll want to maximise your income streams so you’re not reliant too much on one revenue source. Create a mix of passive and active income sources. Passive income comes from work done in the past that still creates revenue without additional input like investments, royalties and licensing. Whereas active income requires regular work to keep growing. Think about how you could build these streams, perhaps leverage IP for passive income or tap new markets for active revenue.
Bandwidth increases.
Unless you’re a 100% brick and mortar business, you’ll likely have more traffic hitting your website or app. You’ll also have more staff accessing internal systems. So, you’ll need to beef up your server load capacity. You’ll also want to think about business continuity and backups. As you grow, every minute of downtime costs you more in lost revenue. So, it’s really important to have a robust infrastructure in place
Branching out.
Often, businesses start out of less-than-ideal locations. Maybe you’re a mom and pop operation running from your garage, but now it’s time to expand. You’ll need to contract suppliers and distributors to ensure customers receive their goods in a timely fashion. You might want to consider central warehousing and distribution to where your customers are. Perhaps look at shared office space with better amenities than you could afford alone. But don’t go too far too soon. You can often start with a pay as you go contract for shared spaces and work up from there. That will help keep your overheads low.
Worlds End Studios
We are here to help you grow and all these changes are likely to alter your space and services requirements. At Worlds End Studios we can help you flex to these changes. We can provide you with resilient scalable services. We can provide you will additional space and services on a short term basis, or on a more permanent basis as your business develops. Keep your overheads low by sharing as you grow and work up from there. That will help keep your overheads low.
Worlds End Studios is home to over 120 businesses, contact us today on 020 7349 7001 or by emailing info@worldsendstudios.com to let us know how we can help you get started.