Expanding Your Business with Help to Grow: Management

This article was written by Stephen Willson, Associate Professor in Management Practice, and Dr Chinny Nzekwe-Excel, Associate Professor and Programme Director of the Help to Grow: Management Course, at Birmingham City University.  

Running a small business means constantly responding to customers, staff, suppliers, and cash-flow pressures. This often leads to strategic thinking being postponed, not because it is unimportant, but because it feels less urgent than today’s operational demands. However, stepping back is essential for expanding your business.  

In this article, we will look at why you may want to expand your business and the common obstacles that business leaders face.  

For some business leaders, growth is a choice driven by ambition. However, others are forced to expand their services because of changing markets, customers or technology. For example:  

• A business providing security staff begins to face competition from automated solutions that can perform similar functions at a lower long‑term cost.  

• An importer of leather goods finds overseas manufacturers selling directly to UK retailers, bypassing traditional distribution channels.  

How you, as a business leader, unlock value for your customers and retain benefits for your organisation is referred to as the business model. As the market conditions change, the business model must evolve to ensure you are addressing your customers' changing needs. 

When you are busy satisfying customers’ pressing demands, it is challenging to make time to explore and understand their evolving needs. Despite difficulty in finding time and assessing customer needs, it is a vital practice for business expansion. 

A question many leaders ask is: “How do I access opportunities to attract new customers and grow sustainably?”  

While external opportunities may exist, growth is often constrained by internal factors, including:  

• Imbalanced workloads at leadership level, leaving little capacity to take on more customers or new initiatives.  

• Founder‑led decision‑making, where too many choices sit with one individual, making it harder to scale or empower others.  

• Resistance to change, where employees’ established ways of working no longer suit a growing or more complex organisation.  

With a focus on growth and business expansion, both the strengths and the weaknesses of an organisation are magnified. This is because business demands change dramatically. In conjunction, the pressures on leadership increase, and informal structures that once worked may begin to strain.  

At this stage in the journey, a challenge for many is transitioning to a business structure with a middle management tier. Team members who match and contribute strongly to early success may not suit the more structured style that growth necessitates. Therefore, it is important to note that growth is not a panacea; while it inevitably brings higher rewards, it also increases risks.  

An awareness of these risks should allow you to question your approaches, like ‘are there intermediate steps to mitigate against failure in the event of unpredictable occurrences?’  

Most business leaders have an interest in how they can be educated and equipped to confidently enrich and expand their business. 

The Help to Grow: Management Course uses real-life illustrations to explore situations that are similar to the experiences of the business leaders on the course. Small business owners develop confidence through candid discussions with others who have faced and addressed similar issues. 

The programme provides participating SME leaders with a network that gives access to resources and insights into business issues. The role of the experienced tutors and wider programme team is to bridge the gap between situation, theory and application, including nurturing enhanced contributions from those whose role is expanding within a growing small business. The indispensable ingredient is the delegates’ openness, willingness to contribute, and engagement with the issues being faced.  

Individual situations are always explored from the perspective of application through asking questions such as ‘what are the underlying issues?’, ‘how should they be analysed?’, ‘what evidence supports each option?’, ‘what is the role of judgement in deciding what should be done?’ Frequently, the questions are enduring, while today’s response may be transient.  

When you're growing your business "continue as we are" is not a strategy for long-term growth. Changing market conditions mean that your direction may change but having clear goals, a plan to achieve them, and metrics to measure your progress are all critical to keep you on track.  

You can find out more about the Help to Grow: Management Course and how it can enable you to expand your business here.