If you have already created a successful business but are looking to grow your initial concept in terms of size and scale then there are a number of important aspects to consider. The two broad types of growth are intensive growth and integrative growth. Each type of growth offers a large variety of different strategic elements to consider when expanding your operation. It is important to choose a strategy that best fits the goals or ambitions associated with growing your business and to what extent you would like your growth to reach.
Intensive Growth
Perhaps the most rudimentary concept involved with growing your business is to choose a strategy that involves garnering the greatest volume of success in exchange for the least amount of work involved and the least amount of risk and liability to you and your business concept. It can be helpful to visualize the growth of your business as being similar to a ladder. Before you place your foot on the next rung you have to make sure that you have built a solid platform to hold your weight on the rung below.
Market penetration is perhaps one of the most core concepts when it comes to intensive growth. In essence, you want to be able to sell more of your product to a competitor's traditional market of consumers. In order to accomplish this you need to find methods to identify your market of consumers. This can be accomplished a number of different ways, such as innovating the manners in which you provide your product or service. For example, if it is a product sold in stores then you may also want to explore internet sales.
It is also extremely important to continue to innovate, not only the ways in which the products or services are delivered, but also the products and services themselves. This is perhaps the best way to mature relationships with existing consumers and being responsive to what it is that they would most like to invest with and support.
Integrative Growth
Integrative growth is another broad category of business growth to consider. The first strategy consideration concerning integrative growth is what is known as horizontal growth strategy. Horizontal growth strategy entails buying a competing business venture. This allows you to not only acquire a greater volume of potential resources, but it also enables to you to control the market share of consumers that used to belong to your competitor.
However, there also exists a strategy known as backward growth. Backward growth involves purchasing and controlling a company that is a supplier for your business in order to facilitate greater influence over the chain of supply connected to your business.
Lastly, there is one other strategy involved with integrative growth. This strategy is known as forward growth strategy. Forward growth entails purchasing business entities that are responsible for selling your product or service in the first place. Thus, the concept provides the opposite tact involved with backward growth, but achieves a means of securing future growth all the same.
