So let's not talk about a growth strategy once you've established your business, you've entered the market, how are you going to grow your business? So you might have ambitions for your business to grow nationally or internationally. Or you might prefer to keep it serving only the local community. Perhaps you want to start off locally and once you've tweaked and proven the business model, you'll franchise that will become a franchisee yourself. The growth strategy doesn't only refer to the geographic aspect of your business, though, or just to making money. things to think about are how will you grow and develop the products and services that you make available to your customers?

Are you going to stay a niche business or will you diversify? So growing the business can be done in a number of ways and these are illustrated and described in the next few points that I'm going to talk about. So there's two main leaders that are available to you. And these already your products, and your customers, and and then market. So using a combination of these is going to give you four broad options about how you can grow your business. And I'm going to talk about these now and describe them in a higher level and then finish off with a bit of a summary.

So firstly, you can do this by utilizing your existing products and services within your existing market. So this essentially means that you're going to be selling more of the same thing to the same customers or to the same type of customers. And this is typically referred to as market penetration. A good example of this is mobile telecommunications companies. And, you know, this is applicable in markets where most people already own a mobile phone. So how are mobile companies going to go and grow their business Well, they're going to run campaigns that drive the purchase of additional SIM cards or contracts or, or handsets.

So, for example, if you look at the United States, there's 103 connections per 100 citizens. And in Panama, each citizen has on average two connections. So don't think of your market as limited by just the amount of people you know, as in one person might buy one. In these examples, we can see that one person buys more than one one product. Next, product development occurs when you target your existing customers and markets by offering new products or new services. And this is an option when you're stuck in a competitive or saturated market.

So we're, again similar to the previous example everybody or every customer has one of something or you have a lot of competitors operating in the same market as as you do. So the strategy growth strategy provides you the opportunity to offer your customers additional products and services. Is that will address the needs. And at the same time, it'll differentiate you from your competitors. If you compare this is not already doing the same thing. So in this case, Apple are a really good example of the company, a company that's very successfully done this Duracell did this as well with the inclusion of their battery tests a feature on the batteries themselves.

So I think you only really need to think about Apple in terms of how they really grow their product line and how they've been able to take a number of products and sell all of these products to the same customers. Next, taking your existing products and services and marketing these and selling them to new markets. This is called market development. And the strategy works well when you've got a strong product or services that are really differentiated from your customers, products or services. And this would generally mean that these new markets have not already had access to these type of products or services. So you're the first one into these markets.

That are selling the sorts of products and services. Alternatively, there might not have been products or services that competitors provide. But you can provide them at a lower cost. And a good example of this is Coca Cola taking their products to the Russian market. Previously, there was no one operating there in that sphere. And Coca Cola was able to successfully position their products into this new into this new market.

Finally, is diversification. And this refers to tackling new markets with new products and services. So this is typically an approach that carries the most risk, but can also have the most potential. A really good example here is Honda, and this is a company that does it really well. So hunter really started as a motorcycle company, and now they manufacture things like cars and trucks, and even boat and lawnmower engines. So these are the four key strategies in which which you can use to grow your market and The last slide here really summarizes how these all relate to each other.

Again by talking about the two levers that you can move, the one being customers or markets, and the other mean products and services. And using a combination of these will allow you to cover off a number of different growth strategies. As we've said, market penetration, product development, market development, and diversification. In summary, then, you should now be able to understand and be able to describe the industry that your business operates in. You should be able to define what your business model is. That is how you're going to be making money from your business.

You should be able to describe the products and services that you'll be offering to your customers. You should understand how your business will enter the market in which you operate. And you should be in a position to plan how your business will grow. Be able to articulate all of these in your business plan.