6 Simple Ways to Grow Your Home-Based Business

If we put aside the COVID-19 and its devastating consequences, we can all agree that the contemporary business climate is very friendly to home-based companies. To put it simply, digital technology, access to the global market, and easily available business resources made family-owned businesses compete with larger brands.

So, it shouldn’t come off as a surprise that, according to recent stats, approximately 50% of small businesses start at home, and 60% of the companies without staff are home-based.

We put the term ‘start’ intentionally here since, even though they may for some time enjoy the small-scale convenience, all small-scale companies at some point face the choice to grow and expand or to run the challenge of being tackled by larger opponents.

It should be very obvious which of these two routes your organization should take. Let us see if we can help you out along the way.

Focus on a single product or service

Although expanding your portfolio should be one of your long-term goals, you need to be aware that this should be the end point of your journey, not its start. As a matter of fact, stretching the resources of your venture too thin can only undermine your expansion efforts. Instead, you should try to focus on a single product or service that is driving the strongest revenue and make the foundation by maximizing its potential. Once you reach the necessary level of expertise, establish a stable customer pool, optimize the production, and make your brand part of the local narrative, only then you can consider expansion and productivity.

Offer complementary services

This is one of the easiest ways to make the expansion natural and cover new grounds without losing the focus on your core activities. What exactly are we talking about here? Well, if you are for instance doing relocations, you can offer the service of pre-packing and moving the items. If you are, for instance, doing babysitting services, you can adapt a part of your home and offer full day-care-center services. All these moves are levering your existing customer pool and previous branding effort so they require very few additional marketing resources to help your home-based company establish new sources of revenue.

Prioritize digital assets and components

All these resources are very easy to maintain, present endless scalability options, and are usually rooted in pay-as-you-go subscription-based models, so they present an excellent, money-efficient solution that can be easily adapted to current market necessities. Also, starting your own online store would allow you to process a lot more purchases without burdening your retail points. Keep in mind, though, that this digital transformation requires adequate infrastructure so you will need to raise your tech game. So, consider getting broadband internet with 4G speed and devices with adequate processing power.

Maximize the earnings from existing customers

Expanding a company requires considerable financial resources which can be obtained in several ways. The best option you have at your disposal, by far, is to try to increase your company’s revenue. Keeping that in mind, the recent surveys say that more than 50% of the average company’s revenue comes from existing customers and that these clients are willing to spend 67% more than new ones. So, if you want to make extra money, this is the way to go. Start by segmenting your audience, creating personalized offers, improving customer satisfaction, sending re-engagement emails, and, finally, starting a reward program.

Engage in content marketing and start a blog

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should overlook other digital marketing channels that can help you to cover quite a lot of ground with very few invested resources. But, one of the main benefits of starting your blog and providing a stable influx of fresh content comes in the fact that this strategy provides excellent branding opportunities and practically transforms your website from the place where people come to buy to a platform they use to learn and have fun. This lends your home-based business a great deal of authority in the industry. If you want to make a successful expansion you absolutely need this leverage.

Establish connections with complementary companies

Last but not least, we would like you that strength often lies in numbers. Therefore, if you have trouble competing with bigger players in the industry consider forging alliances with businesses offering complimentary services. For instance, if you are selling homemade meals, you can find valuable allies in the companies selling organic products or local delivery services. These ties make room for strategic partnerships, joint marketing, efforts, and so on. Joining ranks with the companies within your own industry, on the other way, opens up the way for various discounts, bulk purchases, and similar benefits.

We hope these six suggestions gave you a general idea about the ways you can set foundations for your company’s growth and finally launch it from the home-based league right into the SMB sector. The most important thing to remember, however, is that although home-based companies make an excellent starting point the businesses that try to keep things low level usually disappear in the wake of a more ambitious competition. Keep that in mind while preparing your business for expansion. The tips we gave you will definitely nudge you in the right direction.