Assessing Your Current Market Position
A friend once told me business - in particular fashion business - is seemingly like high school. It’s a social game with lots of moving parts and room for error. Getting a solid footing in the market can be a little bit like finding friends who get you. You can’t do that by sniffing around what everyone else is doing, you’ve got to do some reckoning of your own before you understand exactly where you belong.
Self-assessment might seem like a painful or even dangerous pastime, but it’s an important part of scaling effectively. When we check in with the status quo, take honest looks at any markers of success or failures, we get closer to fully understanding our place in the game. And that sort of awareness (however bittersweet it feels) is the very thing that helps us carve out a niche for ourselves and makes us unique.
It’s not only about doing better than the day before either. Sometimes having an honest chat with the team about what it looks like to fail together can help with spotting holes in execution, quality control, client interaction, and communication. This sort of assessment has lasting impacts too - especially when we exercise it regularly and involve new voices each time.
Consistency here will tell people you’re serious about growth and are receptive to feedback which are both things people value on personal and professional fronts. It’s important not to go down this path with shame or guilt because those emotions are rarely ever productive. But there is almost never merit in bringing your best efforts into play - without compromising overall well-being.
It might feel like parting from familiar patterns is far too dangerous when stakes are high but what you often find is that being open minded as a practice at work improves retention, well-being, and respect for leadership. And these things make scaling so much easier because there is no resistance (subtle or overt) at any point in the organisation. I should probably stress on how important assessment and evaluation are at every stage in scale but I also think trusting the process as it unfolds does have its place.
Sort of.
Identifying Growth Opportunities
A little bit of digging into your business can help you find new ways to grow, which is more than just increasing sales or entering new markets. Growth can take many forms, such as developing new products, forming partnerships, improving customer experience, and using digital marketing. All of these things lead to meaningful growth. Businesses like small shops, tech start-ups, or service providers can identify opportunities by looking at what their competitors are doing, keeping an eye on the market, and understanding what customers want.
You need to make smart decisions that fit with your long-term goals and vision. You must first understand your strengths and weaknesses before you can come up with new ideas. Do this by regularly analysing your business's financial performance, customer data, and market trends to find areas that could use improvement or growth.
Once you know where you stand, you can confidently pursue growth opportunities that align with your goals. Finding growth opportunities involves more than just coming up with new product or service ideas.
It also involves taking steps to build on those ideas and turn them into reality. Sort of. This means putting in place systems for getting feedback from customers and looking at industry trends so that you know what changes to make and when.
The key is finding the right balance between growing quickly and making sure your products are good. If you want your business to do well in the long run, you need to find ways for it to grow in a way that makes sense for its overall vision and mission. Don't be afraid to take risks when they pay off—sometimes a little luck comes from trying something new.
Building a Scalable Business Model
Scaling your business can often feel like pushing a boulder up a steep hill - there’s sweat and anxiety, and you’re never quite sure if it’ll all roll right back. But it doesn’t have to be quite as daunting. When you build on top of a model that’s flexible and well-organised, you can always keep adjusting your systems till you get it right.
I think the biggest thing that holds most entrepreneurs back is a tendency to overthink scale. We spend far too much time worrying about what could go wrong instead of what we can actually make go right. When you have the space to keep pivoting and testing, it becomes a lot easier to stay on track with your expansion goals.
Keeping your team aligned, especially in the early days, is really important so there are no massive surprises down the line. Of course, being able to stay agile and keep experimenting is easier said than done. You need the right tools and data at hand to check which part of your model needs what exactly. When you have easy access to this information, you can keep scaling without missing out on new opportunities.
Sort of. In the end, having a business model that keeps up with the times is what sets good brands apart from great ones. If you already know who your audience is and where their problems lie, half your work is taken care of for you. It’s when you take your learnings from repeated testing that things tend to fall into place - or at least seem like they do for other people.
Leveraging Technology for Expansion
I Suspect people often think 'tech' means robots or ai running the whole show. But it's more practical than that. It's not some magic button you press that fixes everything - it's tools for communication, crunching numbers, making sense of who is buying what, and who is not.
The way I see it, digital platforms are where there are more eyes, clicks, and likes than ever before - so knowing how to make your brand live on such a platform is like being the most popular kid in school. The thing with technology is that it's so versatile and it will definitely grow with you. Even when you don't want it to.
In fact, using the right tools across different teams can bring them all together and make them work towards a common goal. When it comes to business expansion, technology can also be used to learn more about where your potential customers are, what they need from you, and how you might do a better job than your competitors. But a business can't operate only on data alone.
People make up the core of any successful company, and even customers connect better with people than anonymous brands with bots for salespeople. Yes, technology does help with scaling up, but if you want to stay relevant across territories and cultures, you'll need to establish a healthy balance between people and their cultures, and tech-driven automation. Overall, I think we'll always need a mix of both - without people-driven businesses, things can get rather impersonal and boring. But without good technology supporting operations from all sides as companies expand, things can get quite overwhelming for teams trying to keep the business afloat.
Developing a Strategic Marketing Plan
Can’t say we talk about this enough but people are still getting it wrong. We have been shown a deluge of marketing plans, and most people are shying away from creating one that suits their business. The term strategic marketing plan sends many new entrepreneurs running for the hills.
Which is why everyone seems to think the same techniques will work for every business. One size fits all might work for a pair of socks, but it certainly doesn’t with your customers. If you want to drive steady sales, this is exactly what your focus should be on.
Sure, you can slightly offer a great product or a good service but unless you put yourself out there you’re only hitting your head on the wall and achieving nothing. It seems like which is quite a bit rather unfortunate. When developing a marketing plan tailored to your business, creating customer personas that focus on highlighting their pain points are essential.
Another element that helps make sure you’re not lost in the crowd is conducting competitor research and positioning yourself where you belong in the grand scheme of things. I’ll be honest, marketing plans can seem overwhelming if you haven’t done them before. But there’s plenty of guides out there that can help you understand how one should be done.
And yes they are possibly important even if you have been in business for 3 years or 15 years; this might be because you’re missing out on an opportunity to scale without even realising it.
Measuring Success and Adjusting Strategies
Implies That we don’t talk about failure enough. This whole ‘move fast, break things’ attitude that’s become entrenched in the startup world is not as appealing to the fashion industry and independent designers who don’t have investors to fall back on. With fashion, you do have to be innovative, but many people just can’t afford failure. That said, it’s important to take stock of things before making any major decisions.
One way to do this is by keeping track of KPIs and using them to measure how successful you are in your chosen metrics. That’s the thing with KPIs - there are so many, it’s impossible to keep track of them all. That’s why narrowing down KPIs and tracking the ones that matter is better than being too broad and running the risk of drowning in data. It seems like say a designer is going global, their kpis might look very different from a brand that’s only selling domestically.
Their customer base, brand messaging, and packaging will all need to be reconsidered for their new goals. That means looking at new metrics such as local SEO in new markets and social engagement in those areas. But what happens when things don’t go according to plan.
What if your numbers are saying your brand just isn’t working. This isn’t always a bad thing. It allows you to reorient your strategy for this next phase of growth and prioritise what needs work.
The first step is occasionally identifying why something didn’t work and then figuring out how you can fix that. The good news is a bit that nothing about your current business expansion strategy is set in stone, so it can all be changed.