Advice For Expanding Your Professional Area Of Operations

For all the talk of expanding or moving offices, developing in-house logistics, or developing more departments, some of the minor achievements of small firms or even sole traders are lost. But expanding your professional area of operations, however modestly, can be a worthwhile milestone worthy of celebration.

For example, perhaps you’ve hired a driver and purchased a company van, meaning your small farm shop now has the chance to make deliveries and connect to your local community more easily. Maybe you’re a contractor investing in portable tools such as Kemppi welders, and can now cover more clients surrounding your city.

Either way, these incremental approaches can help sustain your firm, gain more clients, and curate a better, stronger foothold in the market. So, in this post, we’ll discuss a few modest methods of expanding your professional area of operations, to help you seamlessly slip into larger relevance.

Without further ado, let’s begin:

Set Catchment Areas

First, we have to set the areas we’re expanding into. Perhaps you want to cover a couple more surrounding towns, or you’re a locksmith and have just integrated emergency 24/7 service for people locked out of their households or businesses. Setting the exact definitions for how you can market this expansion is key. It will help define your path forward, and also think through the implications of that – how much more fuel cost per clientele will your additional van route require, for instance? This will help you define value.

Consider Expanding Clientele

It’s not just proximal distance that matters when curating your area of operations, but who you can reach in that space. For example, adding a contractor to your small firm who can speak both Spanish and French might be ideal if you live in a diverse area with multiple cultures – perhaps opening up your service to an entire cohort of people you wouldn’t have connected with otherwise. For that reason, sometimes just hiring the right person expands your clientele.

Build Out Your Service

Sometimes, an incremental upgrade is tantamount to a full expansion, and that’s wise. Maybe you’ll build in outsourcing functionality so you can use online writers or artists to help build your content strategy, meaning that each project will have a focused approach behind it. Maybe you’ll offer consulting services to businesses smaller than you. The logical extension of some services could be worth the investment, such as expanding who you can service correctly. Maybe you have a point-of-sale system, and build out the software to now function well for restaurants. This way, you naturally align yourself with other areas of the market, without having to rewrite your entire business model.

Bonus: Full Research & Cost Your New Approach

It goes without saying that no expansion should just happen for the sake of it, because a lean and agile operation is often better than one trying to be everything to every client. Will a fully researched and costed approach, you can determine exactly when you expect a return and benefit from that foresight going forward.

With this advice, we hope you’ll expand your area of operations with care.