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CHAPTER 9 GROWING YOUR BUSINESS EMPIRE

a small business so why should I expand?” or they say, “ I
just want to maintain my sales and profits.”

I have found that it is absolutely crucial to keep expanding
your operations, sales and profits. The moment your business
stops growing, it starts dying! The moment you stop expanding,
your business starts shrinking. Sorry to be so dramatic, but
it is true.

Nothing remains constant in your business environment. New
competitors enter all the time. Existing competitors keep getting
stronger by the day. They keep improving their products/
services and expanding their own market share. Consumers’
needs keep changing and expectations keep rising. So, if
you keep running your business the same way, you are not
really maintaining the status quo, you are slowly but surely
getting left behind, as everything around you is changing and
moving forward.

I have seen so many cases of entrepreneurs who used to do
well at the beginning. Soon, the markets they were serving
began to change or disappear and their once lucrative business
quickly disappeared. Here’s a good example. During the late
1990s owners of CD shops began to see their customers
disappear as people starting buying and downloading music
online. Then many retailers went bust as consumers of luxury
goods lost their spending power during the last recession.

The cause of all these business failures was not the external
factors alone. It was primarily because these business owners
did not expand fast enough to diversify their operations among
different markets so that a boom in India can make up for a
downturn in Singapore. They did not expand into new product

264 SECRETS OF BUILDING MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESSES