http://www.callcenteragency.com/ | Small businesses often reach a point where their current business model needs to change. If income is not enough to sustain operations, there is too much work for employees, or management can no longer effectively run the company, then it may be time for a business to expand.

1. How to Know When It's Time to Expand Your Business
Every small business owner simultaneously looks forward to and dreads reaching the point
where their business needs to expand. Can they afford it? Will the business be stretched too thin?
Is it really the right time?
The first step to a successful small business expansion is to correctly identify when your business
has reached the point where growing, diversifying, and restructuring is necessary. There are
several points in a business's lifecycle where expansion becomes necessary, including the
examples listed below:
● Your Business Needs More Capital than It Brings in – one of the most awkward
situations a business can be in is when it is succeeding in bringing in customers (and
money), but it still doesn't generate enough capital to support itself. This is a dangerous
place for a small business to find itself in, and one that usually isn't easy to get out of.
Moving past this phase means either slimming down (and thus losing customers and
income), or courting new investors who can provide capital to keep the company afloat,
and thus expand and diversify operations so that the business can become self-sustaining.
● You've Reached the Limit of Your Market – for businesses in niche markets, one of
the pitfalls of success is reaching the end point of what that market can sustain. If your
business's products have a limited potential customer base and no way to diversify into
other products, the level of growth it can achieve is limited by the parameters of its
marketplace. When your business ends up in this situation, the only option is to expand
into other products and markets in order to sustain its growth.
● There's More Work than Your Employees Can Handle – while more customers are
always a good thing, your business will reach a point where its current employees won't
be able to effectively handle any more work. At that point, it becomes a choice between
accepting a decline in the quality of the work your company does (never a good idea) or
expanding operations, either by hiring more workers or outsourcing additional work to an
answering service, call center, or other contractor.
● There Are Too Many Employees for Your Management – part of the process of hiring
more employees to handle all the work that needs to be done is that, eventually, there will
be more workers than your current management structure can handle. When that happens,
it often means that it's time to restructure the business's management plan. Sometimes
this just means hiring more managers or promoting current staff members, but other times
it will require more expansive changes, such as creating new departments and changing
the way that work is assigned and handled.
Has your business reached any of these roadblocks? If so, then it is probably time to start
seriously considering expanding. By analyzing your business's strengths and its available capital,
come up with a vision for where you want to take it in the future, and how you can execute that
plan.