A Quick Guide to Expanding Your Business Beyond Borders
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Every business has the potential to grow, and not only within its community. There will come the perfect opportunity in which the brand reaches the pinnacle of its success, where the next logical and inevitable step is to introduce it to an international audience. Your business, however small it is right now, can reach that critical point. The only question you will have to tackle by then is knowing how to bring your brand across borders. Global entrepreneurs planning expansion into new markets should explore E2 Visa Business Plan Services to align with visa compliance.
Expansion beyond your immediate community presents an entire universe of opportunities, leading towards building a legacy within your industry. Then again, the process is nothing short of complicated. Aside from time and money, it demands a great deal of physical and mental effort, especially when you know you’re building a presence in unfamiliar territory. This is not to say you can’t make the process less taxing and less risky. To make the most of it would mean getting the right advice. Use the guide below as your starting point:
Reasons to Expand Beyond Borders
Before we get into the more practical side of the process, it matters to realize that expanding your business into new markets is not a game plan you can come up with overnight. While you can set it as a long-term goal for your brand, you need to be intentional. You need to establish your destination before you can come up with a strategy. In turn, your destination should be supported by a realistic purpose.
Expansion shouldn’t be done on a whim. At the same time, you will need to know if your brand has entered a new chapter where growth is guaranteed. As you think about building a new branch in another area or charting a new path for your business, consider these key reasons:
- Increase your base: Perhaps the best reason for expanding your business is to increase its profitability. To do that would mean expanding your presence into local or international communities that have never heard about your brand before. Your windows into new consumer pools expand as you secure a share of the local market for the products or services you’re selling. When done right, your expansion efforts can boost your revenue and fuel further growth.
- Reduce your exposure to risk: No one can tell if the community you’re serving will always be favorable to your brand’s growth. There will be periods when local conditions hinder your business from maintaining a healthy cash flow. To make sure your revenue stream remains consistent, building a presence in another location can help cushion the effects of uncertainty on the initial market. As your brand catches on in the new location, you can tap into opportunities you would never have encountered if you remained boxed in.
- Compete in your industry: If you think your business has the potential to compete with bigger brands in your industry, then expanding to new markets can put you on the right track. Investing in cross-border growth will gradually increase your market share and visibility, allowing you to compete for more buyers, overcome local competitors, and gain global relevance.
- Tap Into global skills: International expansion offers you the opportunity to absorb talents and resources that could innovate your brand and allow you to come up with new ideas for products and services. Your exposure to an international audience can also help refine your business model and culture. There are ideas and concepts that only an international talent is capable of contributing, so we aim to offer positions for international employees willing to share their perspectives.
- Enhance efficiency: As you expand, you also develop ways to reduce waste, improve productivity, and build more efficient supply chains. You gain access to resources that are much cheaper but of higher quality, which could lead to reduced costs and more efficient output. This, in turn, can increase your brand’s profitability and enhance production as you aim to diversify your products and cater to a growing market.
Building linkages with other international brands and partnering with global institutions are also expected when your business’s presence crosses borders. These reasons and more could contribute to your excitement in building a new domestic branch or promoting your products to people living halfway across the world. All you need is to develop the right strategy. The next section outlines the steps to get started on the path to a larger stage.
A Roadmap to Greater Relevance: 5 Expansion Tips to Keep in Mind
When it comes to expanding your business, you wouldn’t want to get started on the wrong motives and, more so, the wrong approach. Along the way, you will be spending significant amounts of time, money, and effort that will all go to waste and cripple your brand as a whole if you go the wrong way. Make the most of everything you invested in your business’s growth by following this simple walkthrough:
1. Assess Your Current Business Situation
There’s nothing wrong with being motivated by the thought of seeing your brand build an international audience. However, you need to understand if your current context provides the perfect opportunity for expansion.
You are at a greater risk of losses when your brand barely has enough resources and hardly any reputational traction to warrant a presence in another community. You need to stay grounded as you contemplate your business’s growth needs.
For this reason, it matters to take the time to assess your current business practices and business model on top of determining your brand’s long-term profitability. If its current revenue stream barely supports the need for more employees and equipment, then you may want to focus more on making your business more self-sustaining.
You will also need to know if your business has enough people and resources to operate in a growing market. In any case, meet with your core business development team and see if your brand is ripe for expansion or, at least, come up with an expansion strategy that takes all of these variables into account.
2. Gather Necessary Information
As you assess your business’s readiness for expansion, your strategy should provide a specific timeline along with a clear set of short-term and long-term goals. This makes it easier for you to identify possible action plans to pursue that make the most of every resource. Your strategy should include potential markets to expand into, as well as the means to fill the gaps in terms of financing. Approach these methods carefully so you can reduce your exposure to costly risks.
Wherever you want to expand your presence and how, careful research should provide you with insights into opportunities and threats to be expected in the local market. If you’re planning to build your first overseas branch in Bermuda, assess the landscape and find out which brands selling the same types of products and services are already there.
The same is also true if your expansion strategy includes licensing your brand to a local distributor. Gather data on consumer behaviors as well as economic information, such as the average cost of living and the market shares of each potential rival.
3. Create a Separate Business Plan
Using the data you’ve gathered in your market research, come up with a localized business plan that allows you to target the opportunities present in the local market. It is here that you get to decide on how to align your brand’s value proposition with local customers and modify your identity in a way that responds to their culture and values without watering down your business’s uniqueness. Your business plan should also include promotional materials and value propositions that respectfully engage the needs and desires of local consumers.
Additionally, you will want to include logistical details in your business plan. Consider how you want to source raw materials locally and build supply chains with original vendors and suppliers, especially if your expansion goal revolves around building a new branch that might not have direct access to the resources you use to make your flagship products in your original brand. You might also want to offer localized versions of these products or sell new ones. Whichever the case, your expansion should have a well-crafted business plan that lets you make the most of what you have to succeed.
4. Designate an Expansion Team
Putting your business plan and expansion strategy into motion is a process that requires collective effort. Apart from your core business development team that helps in crafting your expansion strategy, you need to build a separate team that will oversee the expansion process.
If you’re building your first international branch, you will have to access local technical expertise, especially when it comes to construction, architecture, and interior design. For instance, your brand of casinos in the United States can benefit significantly from a company like I-5 Design Build, which has a massive portfolio of projects across the country.
Building a branch should also come with understanding the legal requirements for doing so. You need to understand that certain countries have strict rules governing foreign brands, especially if you’re expanding internationally.
An international legal team will help you navigate potential hurdles and ensure that your brand’s presence in the new location does not violate any local and national statutes. It also helps if you have local contacts and business partners who can guide you through licensing and forging local agreements to ensure that your brand operates legitimately.
5. Monitor and Provide Autonomy
A new branch in another country is better off operating as though it’s a separate entity. The culture isn’t the same as in your home country, so you will have to recognize how the dynamics work when it comes to recruitment and management. It matters to provide local teams with enough space to execute decisions and implement your brand’s main thrusts so long as these conform to your business’s overall mission.
As much as you want to provide such an amount of space for local teams to move, you still need to track how well the expansion is performing. Local customers may not have the same sentiments as when your brand first set foot, so you may have to come up with a different strategy in response to such shifts. What’s more, support this new location with resources and additional training to ensure that it’s consistent with the overall business model.
Endnote
Expansion is inevitable if your business reaches the peak of its local success. However, knowing what’s at stake as you enter markets beyond borders, you need to make sure you’re going the right way by keeping this guide in mind. For post-expansion guidance, see A Complete Guide to Managing Your Lease End.