How To Grow Your Business?

2-minute read

How can you grow your business quickly and sustainably? How can you tell which opportunities are worth pursuing? And what should you do if success takes longer than anticipated?

Here, NZTE private sector advisor Stefan Preston suggests the mindset you need to adopt, and the kind of business model you need to have to sustain rapid international growth.

Know where you want to get to

Having a rough idea of where you want to get to will help you avoid ending up somewhere you don’t want to be. When making decisions, imagine your ideal future business, 5 to 10 years down the track, and start working towards that today.

This might mean getting started without all of the necessary information or resources to complete the job, and making course corrections as new information comes to light.

But how can you design for a future you don’t know? There’s a lot you can know about the future through the technologies out there that make it faster and more cost-efficient to grow a business, such as mobile apps, the internet of things, and cheaper computing devices.

Stress-test your business model

Your product or service might be great and your vision clear, but how robust is the design of your business? Ask yourself:

  • Can it grow cheaply? Your business model needs to be able to grow fast and cost-effectively without a lot of capital investment.
  • Can I defend it? Or will someone come along and copy it?
  • Do I have the capacity to scale? This could be the technology, sales, digital or experience, i.e. people who can tell me what I don’t know.
  • Who is the target market? Is it big enough? Is it easy to access?

Act fast and fail cheaply

When businesses first start experiencing success, opportunities appear from everywhere and its tempting to say yes to them, but not all growth is good growth.

Common mistakes early-stage exporters make are:

  • entering too many markets
  • having too many channels (they compete with each other)
  • producing too many products
  • being unable to defend their business model when someone comes along and copies it – because competition in overseas markets is fierce.

Complexity can kill a business, so it’s important to find your niche – and to do it quickly and cheaply.

If something isn’t working, kill it. If you get new information that suggests moving in a different direction, don’t be afraid to pivot.

Fail as cheaply as possible, and if you have success at something, double up. The bravery to fail will require a growth mindset, not a fixed one.

More information can be found on NZTE.

Source: New Zealand Trade & Enterprise

P.S. Easy Freight Ltd helps New Zealand importers & exporters to save money on international freight and reduce mistakes by guiding how to comply with Customs and biosecurity rules. 

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