This article comes from Entrepreneur.

5 Tips for Expanding Your Small Business

To avoid making similar mistakes, heed these five tips for expanding your small business (the right way).

1. Develop a company culture.

A strong company culture is what will keep your small-business team together during times of exponential growth. If you’re not sure where to start, ask yourself and your team questions such as:

• Why does our company exist?
• Why do we do what we do?
• What does our company believe in?
• What are our values?
• Where do we want our company to go, i.e. what’s our company’s vision?

When employees feel connected to your company, they’ll be more likely to stick it out through uncertain times. Plus, a strong company culture can actually attract new customers to your business, so be consistent with it and splash it everywhere, including your website, social-media platforms, marketing materials, etc. When your target audience can see the values behind your company, they can connect with your business on a deeper level.

2. Hire the right people.

The hiring stage is critical to growing your business successfully. It’s important to take your time and find the right people for the job. Do so and things will go swimmingly. Hire the wrong people, and all of your hard work will come crumbling down. To avoid the latter fate, consider recruiting people based on their technical skills and experience. You should also determine if they’ll be a good fit during this time of growth. For instance, you could ask a candidate how they interpret your company’s vision to see if they’ll mesh well with your team. Startup life isn’t for everyone, so find employees who will be eager to take on the challenge.

3. Focus on innovation … in the right places.

When expanding your small business, you might be tempted to spend a bunch of money on improving your product or creating/offering more products. Instead, focus on innovation in other areas. As one example, try innovating your onboarding experience or adopting new technology like live chat to scale your customer service, as with this savvy Petplan campaign. Innovating your current processes will take up less of your resources, and it’s critical when growing your customer base. Once you’ve achieved more stability, then you can think about introducing new products.

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