Cake Decorating Business #10: Planning to Expand and Grow of Your Business

Part #10: Planning to Expand and Grow of Your Business

Once things start to really move along in your business and you start to turn away business, you may find yourself thinking about expanding your business. The first thing you’re not sure of is how to expand in the first place. Do you get a bigger premises, hire on some staff, begin to outsource some jobs? Perhaps you need to do all of those in order to cope with how much your business has grown. It’s important at this point to re-evaluate why you are in business and where it is you are heading, and remind yourself again what the ultimate goal is. Knowing where you are heading is what will help you make the decisions about hiring, outsourcing or moving locations.

As an example, suppose you really are very happy with where your business is at and you don’t want to expand any further because it’s serving it’s purpose and you have neither the need nor desire to grow. That’s perfectly fine, but if you are turning away work every week (and that in itself is overwhelming) then it’s probably time to think about both raising your prices and slowing your marketing down a little bit. Both of those activities will naturally slow business down a little bit and take them back to manageable levels. Suppose the opposite is true and your dream is to open a shop font – then this is the time to look at outsourcing some activities like bookkeeping and looking at commercial premises for hire. Or perhaps you’ve already got an employee and you’re deciding if you should hire on a second one – this is the time to look at the work flow of who is doing which jobs and where the new employee would fit into the existing work of your business. At several points over the life of your business you will run into what I refer to as the “grow or stop” stage, where you are needing to make decisions to either GROW your business, or STOP growing your business. At some point you may even reach that moment where to ‘stop’ actually means to sell the business, and that too is a big decision.

The way to prepare for growth or expansion if you know that’s what you want for your business is pretty simple – it starts with some goal setting and planning. Take the time to write (or expand or modify) your business plan for how you are wanting it to look into the future. Outline the steps and the milestones and resources you are going to need to head into that expansion. What will it mean for your business from a financial point of view? Will you need to find some financial backing, or can you afford to invest yourself? What about from a personnel point of view? If you were to expand, how many more people would you need to hire, and what skills would they need in order to be useful to you? One thing which often gets neglected in these goal setting exercises is thinking about your personal life. So if you move your business out of home and into a shop front, what will those changes mean for your life? What changes about the logistics about your life and your family?

The important thing to remember in all of this is that it is better (where possible) to plan for expansion and growth rather than realise one day that you are overworked and overwhelmed and needed help a long time ago. You can plan for growth and start doing it as a gradual process. For example, your first step to growth might be to outsource some of the activities you do. If those tasks were done by someone else, perhaps it would free you up to take on a few more orders. Once you start taking on a few more orders, your next step towards growth might be hiring a helper once a week who takes over the ‘boring but important’ smaller jobs of the cake production process such as making icings and cutting out smaller details from fondant. That person might then move up to working an additional day of the week to help with baking, and over time they make take over more days work and more responsibility until it becomes time to hire on yet another person. Growth can happen gradually and you can control the rate of growth too – just because your nearest competitor is opening a shop front next week that does not mean that you need to as well. Growth is often determined by factors such as finance, time and personal circumstances – so although there is a plan in place, you may be forced to speed that plan up OR slow it down. Without a plan to begin with you will be making decisions based in desperation rather than planned growth – and its in those highly emotional times that we make decisions we regret later.

If you’re planning to grow your business, create a plan for that expansion and growth, but keep an eye on it. It can be very tempting to just run out and hire people, get a bigger kitchen, and do all sorts of things but you are much better off making decisions from a place of planned growth than out of desperation.

_ Written by Michelle Green 2014, Copyright The Business of Baking_