How European Business Can Expand in the Face of an Uncertain Future

Make Telecommunications Efficient

Saving money on telecommunications is important because the telephone bill can be surprisingly high for growing businesses. Being able to use an eVoice Call Forwarding service that can move calls to an external operator when all the lines are busy takes the weight off and manages costs well. Whether needing to redirect a volume of calls during peak times or until more lines can be installed, not missing a phone call from a prospective or current client is still important.

Find Affordable Business Finance

Many businesses fail because they lack sufficient capital to expand successfully. Without enough money on hand to deal with the increased expenses, companies risk starving themselves on the cash flow end of the business. Seeking new finance arrangements is important before going off on a large expansion project. The money should be there – whether through a line of credit or a flexible lending facility – to fund future expansion projects.

Make sure that the income expectations are reasonably prudent and not overly optimistic. When the numbers are incorrect, any lending arrangement will be set up for the wrong amounts, so it's vital that the financial projections are as accurate as possible.

Use Freelancers to Reduce Payroll Costs

While expanding or trying new projects, you do not know how successful or long-lasting the business expansion will be. It's possible that it may not succeed, in which case the company may need to lay people off and let them down. Severance costs and other related expenses become expensive. It might be worth considering using more freelancers and not part-time or full-time employees to complete key tasks that don't need to be performed at the office. This way, the freelancers can be paid on a per task or per project basis without the accompanying costs of possibly laying them off later should the expansion have to be scaled back.

Run Lean

Running a lean business has a lot to recommend it. Most companies tend to spend too much on frivolous things and not think about cutting back until the difficult times hit. At this point, the big money has already been spent and cannot be recouped later. It's much better to run lean as a standard operating procedure because it lets businesses live another day. It also makes expansion less expensive too.

Having the confidence to push a business enterprise forward by expanding into a headwind of a difficult trading environment isn't easy. But the rewards are there for business owners that grasp the challenge with both hands.