How to Successfully Expand Your Home-Based Business

When you’ve worked hard setting up and nurturing a fledgling business, realising it’s time to expand is an exciting moment.

Often it means acquiring more space, whether to store your stock, present a more professional face to the world, or have extra office space for a growing employee base.

There’s lots to consider.

When Space is Your Priority

Many businesses, including a few of the world’s giants, have humble beginnings, so that needn’t be a barrier to growth. If you need inspiration, look at these massive companies that grew from relatively small seeds.

Before you start looking for a bigger space to run your business from, make sure you understand exactly what your objectives are. Examples include:

More stock space – is your inventory taking over your home? You could investigate warehousing if you need a massive area. This tends to have additional costs in the form of VAT or business rates on top of the price of renting your space. A second, potentially more manageable and flexible option is self storage for business. Renting a self storage room makes it easy to upscale when you need to and there are no hidden costs.

Office space – if you’ve outgrown the spare bedroom and need a more professional, established location for your business, there are a couple of options here too. Traditionally, rented offices are expensive, however, and most likely will require you to sign a lengthy contract which you may not feel comfortable doing in the early stages of expansion. When you’re looking for versatility along with scalability, with office premises that have the potential to grow with you, a flexible office would be ideal. There are locations all over the country, so it’s worth investigating what’s on offer and getting a quote for flexi office space.

Boost Your Efficiency

As well as obtaining more space, giving productivity and efficiency a boost will help ensure your expansion is successful.

• Streamline operations by doing similar tasks from the same location. Examples could include packing stock ready for dispatch to customers in a retail business. If you can organise your packing area within your stock room, you’ll save tons of time you’d otherwise spend moving items from place to place before you can process them. Using self storage for business space lets you do this. Simply rent a room slightly bigger than you need for storage so you have room for a desk or table. Gather your items and packing materials together, then make up the parcels from your storage base.
• Automate wherever you can by taking full advantage of technology. If you see clients face to face through personal bookings, install booking software on your website so clients can choose their time slots at their leisure. You’ll spend less time on the phone and have more time for appointments.

Use Your Accounts

Tiresome as it may be to constantly update the financial side of running a business, those sets of figures are a rich goldmine of useful information that can help with a successful expansion.

If you use an accountant, chat with them about expansion plans and ask for advice. They can help you direct your plans along the most profitable channels, avoiding expensive mistakes.

But if you do your own accounts, you can still unearth useful information to find out your most profitable lines, any places where you’re losing money, or where profits are too small to make a particular activity sustainable.

When you have a firm grasp of how money is flowing through your business, you’re in a strong position to make informed decisions regarding expansion and investment into a more lucrative future.

Maintain Your Security

Modern business relies heavily on digital information, whether it’s for tax and record keeping, processing invoices, communications and social media, marketing, or research, most of our information is kept in a non-physical format. In the old days, you could just put a padlock on the filing cabinet, but these days we need something a bit more sophisticated. The bigger the business, the greater the need for digital efficiency and security.

From encryption to identification and verification, it can all get very complicated, but one of the simplest things you can do to protect your data is keep regular backups, and even backups of your backups because drives and clouds can be compromised or corrupted.

An external drive is relatively inexpensive, making it easy to create copies of all your important information. Have a couple of them, rotating their use on a daily or weekly basis depending on how much information you have and how often it changes. Do this as well as using cloud backup services. It may sound like overkill, but lost data (especially the information you need to keep by law) can devastate a business. Wherever possible, store your external backups away from the office.

Taking care of all those things sounds like a lot, but a successful business expansion does involve plenty of reflection and careful weighing up of options and choices. Get it right and your business will soar, and that’s the aim of any ambitious business owner.