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Growing Pains: How to Prepare for Business Expansion Before It's Too Late

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Business growth is something that we should all strive for. It doesn’t matter what type of products you sell or the services you provide, everyone should be aiming to improve their business to a point that it generates more profit and demands expansion. You know you’re doing something right when you have to start thinking about moving into a new office or buying out the office next to you.

It’s not only your website that has to grow. Your storage space has to grow, the amount of employees you have has to increase, and you might even need to consider hiring entire teams to do jobs that you used to outsource. No matter what stage your business is currently in, you need to plan ahead else the idea of expansion could scare you away.

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Are You Ready to Grow?



Don’t over exaggerate the need for expansion too soon—it could mean the death of your business if you’re too hasty. Ask yourself if you really need a larger office, or do you just need to tidy up the workplace a bit more? Do you really have to hire more employees, or are your current ones just being lazy? Do you have enough online exposure to warrant having a dedicated media team? Ask yourself these types of questions before taking the plunge and expanding because it’s not a snap decision—it happens slowly over a long period of time.


Increasing Office Space



Moving into a new office or renovating aren’t the only ways to increase your office space. Services like Guardian Business Center can offer you external storage to free up some space in your own office. For example, you could move archives of paper documents or redundant pieces of technology that are waiting to be scrapped. You could also store away useless furniture while you renovate your office, or even use it to host servers and storage devices away from your main computers.

But if external storage isn’t enough and you really do need a bigger and better office, then you’ll have to consider what the cost of moving is. Your employees may potentially have to relocate, which could be unacceptable for some of them and force them to leave your business. You’ll also need to consider moving costs to hire trucks to move your equipment and supplies. You also have to think about how to stay active as a business during a move. You’ll most likely have to set up in the new office first and, over the period of a few weeks, slowly move everything over into the new office.


 

When Do You Start Hiring?



You don’t want to be hasty and start hiring new employees straight away because you smell an expansion opportunity coming up. More often than not, you could jump the gun early and hire more employees than you need, resulting in lower profits and more wasted funds. Instead of hiring early, consider using freelancers and outsourcing to cover for extra workloads. You could also request for some of your employees to do overtime—just remember to pay them!

Once it’s clear that you need new employees, you can stop hiring freelancers (unless they’re doing a great job) and you can start to hire more people to join your business.

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