Most Common Barriers to Business Expansion.
If you’re a small business owner in Singapore, or any other part of the world, company growth should be among your top business goals. While business growth can prove highly exciting and lucrative, entrepreneurs typically face obstacles on their path to long-term success. Whether you’re considering domestic or overseas expansion, an understanding of the related barriers should be of great help.
Here are some common barriers to business expansion that you may need to dodge:
Customers Don’t Know That You Exist
Regardless of how dynamic the Singaporean business market is, if your potential customers don’t know that your business exists, it won’t matter. Merely having an online presence won’t be enough. With thousands of new websites developed around the world every day, it’s easy to get overlooked. To stand out from the crowd, you need to invest in innovative marketing.
Develop a realistic marketing action plan and budget that specifies how your financial and other resources are spread across multiple traditional and digital marketing channels. Don’t forget to include the metrics for them that help you achieve the best return on investment.
Supply Chain Issues
Supply chain complications are among the biggest barriers to business expansion, especially when considering overseas expansion. Complex legislations, including trade deals and international laws strongly impact the particulars of export, import, operational logistics, and shipping of products. Plus, you need to deal with time and cost when shipping goods beyond Singapore, as well as with environmental factors.
Hence, it’s imperative to develop a robust supply chain strategy and make other changes to make business expansion possible. Develop your strategy relative to the location you’re expanding into. This includes learning about the local trade lows, local material sources, and other common external influences in those locations.
Increased Demand for Human Resources
A key step in scaling your business is to enlarge your workforce. You’ll need people with the right skills to manage the increasing workload. But having more employees has its own set of challenges. From hiring the right people and ensuring diversity to managing employees and keeping them motivated, there’s a lot more to take care of.
To simplify the HR roles associated with business expansion, we recommend using automated HR management systems and payroll software.
Use of Innovative Words
In an attempt to attract customers and investors, some marketers unnecessarily use terms like “paradigm shift” or “disruptive technology”. If you’re interested in expanding your business, use these terms sparingly because for normal people, these terms invoke more fear than value. Instead, leverage simplicity in communicating the value of your offerings.
Conclusion
In many cases, an inadequate understanding of barriers to business expansion is the primary reason why startups fail, even with an incredible product or service offering. Now that you’re aware of the biggest obstacles, take the necessary steps to tackle them.
