Have you gotten a small business in Atlanta stable and achieving modest success? Perhaps you have a company in Alabama that you believe it is ready to step up to the next level? Are you not quite sure what to do to get your Southern business to the said next level? If you have answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, this article is the right one for you.
It’s true: trying to grow a small business is difficult, but it’s especially harder in the South of America. For those that are successful, they will usually hit a ceiling that’s businesses in New York, for example, may not have to contest. Some owners are comfortable with simply maintaining that secure position and not taking any risks. Others, however, want to break through in an attempt to land the big bucks.
If you’re in the latter camp, and you want to avoid crashing and burning, here are a few tips for growing your business successfully in the South of the United States for 2021 and beyond.
Offer more
You must widen the net to bring in more customers. A way of doing this is by providing more services and refining the ones you currently offer. For instance, if you run a restaurant, you could expand your services by supplying local delivery. Another example would be for a personal trainer to create a digital workout platform.
Bring in help
Are you stretching yourself thin trying to run all aspects of your business? Well, this is only going to become more of a problem as your company grows. As a result, you will have to bring in employees to ensure your operations’ smooth running.
As a small business, you won’t have the resources to waste when it comes to hiring employees. This means it’s essential your hiring process is right the fire time round. For assistance, QuickBooks has a comprehensive step-by-step guide for hiring employees. Thankfully, the workforce is growing in many Southern hotspots, especially Atlanta, so you should have a large talent pool to hire from to enable you to get the best person possible.
Always use protection
By protection, this means business insurance. Simply put, the more your business grows, the more likely it is to face allegations of negligence, for employees to suffer workplace injuries, and much more. In fact, in Atlanta alone there were over 100,000 of these claims over the course of last year. Just one claim has the potential not only to halt your growth plans but wipe out your business altogether.
While you will already have some form of insurance, you must reassess the situation, as the rules for what kind of worker compensation you need to provide differs between states within the South. For example, workers compensation insurance in Georgia isn’t mandatory if your business only has one or two employees on the books. Yet if you start bringing in additional staff, that workers comp will become a necessity. You also need to provide cover for part-time staff as well in Georgia, not to mention the various other restrictions you’ll face there. This is what makes it a tough place to get a start-up off the ground, however if you preserver, you may begin to benefit off the economic growth of the state, particularly it’s capital, Atlanta. Plus you will always want this form of insurance, so you don’t have to pay out of pocket for lost wages and medical bills caused by an employee getting sick or hurt on the job.
Become more vocal
Your marketing efforts might already be at a decent level, but you need to crank it up when attempting to grow your business. The good news is there are different promotional avenues to go down, meaning there will be some untapped goldmines for you to discover.
Have you implemented a strong SEO plan for your website? Do you know how to utilize PPC effectively? What type of social media presence have you established? Analyze your current marketing methods, see how they can be improved, and explore other techniques you have yet to use.
