Dipping Your Business' Toes Into Another Region
Conquering the world is every business leader’s dream. Your product on the shelves of every store in the real world and online ecommerce website is what the true ambition is. To be this successful you have to start somewhere. And like all successful businesses, you have to first become well-known and loved in a city, town or even village. You have to first spread your wings over your own patch of ground first and fight the local battle. Then you can venture out and begin to deliver to neighboring cities and towns.
This involves a lot of marketing, a lot of legwork on your part to go to different conventions and meet the local populace. After this, you can think of conquering the nationwide field. However, the first step to this is actually, duplicating what you have just done in another region.
What’s the point behind it?
The pace of business today, will make you question why you should do things in such a linear fashion. If you have set yourself up and became a name in one region, surely with the power of all the online tools and options you can go nationwide right?
Well, first of all you have to not get too far ahead of yourself. A modern country is very large not just in space and distance but the amount of people. It's not as simple as taking your business hundreds of miles in one direction and becoming recognized in a short amount of time.
The space you occupy isn’t always representative of the market share. For example, you could take your business towards another region and go as far as setting up three stores 100 miles deep into it. However if the population of that land is a mere few thousand, it's still a smaller market share than if you were to head 50 miles in another direction and have millions of people living in it. Therefore, moving to towards another region has to be done in a strategic fashion so you can have the maximum amount exposure and success.
The possibility to travel far and wide
It's amazing how powerful the real world side of business still is. In fact, it will never become irrelevant. There may be a time when all business is done online, and only deliveries will be done in the real world. However for many businesses, having a real world presence is in fact the only way their business can stay alive and even, exist. Retail is finding this out as more and more people want to walk into stores and try on clothes before they buy them due to insufficient ways of measuring and sizing methods used online. The food industry simply cannot exist purely online. Restaurants and bakeries need to literally exist in the real world to even function. Therefore taking on a new region in your respective country becomes a major challenge for those who want to expand and grow in the efforts to one day, become a franchise.
You need the logistical power first. Freight haulers like Jayde Transport are companies that offer this possibility. Munching up the miles, they have services that deliver products thousands of miles across a country.
For example, if you're a pizzeria and you want to move from the east coast to the west coast, you will need a company that can make long haul trips with your imported goods to your new locations. The Italian provolone cheese that you import and docks in the east coast, needs to be delivered to your new restaurants in the west. The key is to have the ability to transport what you need to keep running your new locations.
Scope the competition
You have to scope the competition out first and see what you’re up against as you expand. If you move into an area where there is a similar business that does fantastic work and sells some of the best products and services around, you have stiff competition already. If they have been established in the area for a long time and multiple generations have been using it for their needs, then winning over customers will be a difficult task.
This is why you need to strategically plan your moves so you don’t land in too deep water where you can’t swim or keep your head above the surface. Move into areas that seemingly have gaps in them so you fill a void for consumers.
This can be done by tactically locating yourself so you are in distance of multiple towns and cities. Or you can set yourself up on the empty side of a city where aren’t many similar businesses, for example. No doubt the successful companies will already be wanting to move there so if you can beat them to the punch you have gotten yourself a good head start. The local people will know your name before they will of the business that perhaps their friends and family use all the time. This is only won when you are tactically locating your business and timing your arrival at the precise time when there is a gap in the market.
Furthering your influence into another region is a test for any business of any size. It's fraught with many dangers such as being squeezed out of the market share, not having the correct logistics and being unable to compete effectively against established names. However, if done right you can build an empire that will grow and expand successfully.
