When it comes to growing your business, sustainability is a big issue. Too often we see businesses see explosive growth in the early days only for this growth to slow down sharply resulting in the business to need to downsize or find itself in a situation where costs have risen out of control so that it eventually needs to shut down. Here are some things that you can consider when growing your business to ensure that it is sustainable, and has a longer lifespan than it would otherwise.

Solve a Big Problem

Give people what they want. Do not use the philosophy of “build it and they will come”. This is totally wrong. You do not want to build capacity with the eventual hope that demand will rise to match your increased capacity. The prime example for this, and a dramatic demonstration of this idea on a very large scale is Moscow’s brand new financial district. It is home to most of Europe’s tallest buildings and more are still under construction. The idea was to build a lot of fancy offices and then watch occupants flood in. This thinking is totally backwards. These towers were built without the matching demand. The result is a 45% vacancy rate. This is only due to rise seeing as much of it is still under construction. On a smaller scale, you will not want to make the same mistake. While increasing your production capacity might seem to be good on the surface, unless you use it all, you are throwing your money away and jeopardizing the future of your business. When thinking about new products, you may also want to use the same thinking that Google does when they come up with new products. Try to invent something like the toothbrush. This means that you will want to provide something that people will want to use at least twice a day. Try to keep it simple, too.If you cannot explain what the product or service does in simple terms, it probably is not a good idea.