Growth And Development For Small Business

In life, the law of nature imposes on all creations a life cycle experience. These are the stages on which everything must tag along to continue to be significant. Small Business organizations must follow these stages to fully maximize its life cycle: Conception stage, Introduction stage, Development stage, Growth stage, Maturity stage and Decline stage. These stages are linked with one another through an alteration.

Among the stages, growth and development is very crucial to sustain the survival of small businesses because many businesses fail during this stage. This notion leads us to the concept of growth and development.

The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1993) defined growth as, “increase in size or value”. Development is defined as, “the state of advancement or stage of growth”. This implies to make or become bigger, fuller, more elaborate e.t.c. The core idea behind this definition centers on “increase”. Therefore, the idea of growth and development is similar to increase in the size of seedlings planted by farmers or babies born to humans. In this sense, it is not enough to establish a small business but that firm must grow and develop to maximize benefits for the owners and all other stakeholders.

Since growth and development equals increase in size, value, and resources the success of a firm equals the growth attained. It is often assumed that to be truly successful a small business must manage its transition into a larger one successfully.

Growth of business can be organic and inorganic. Organic being influenced by internal factors such as increase in sales profit etc while inorganic growth is the rate of business, sales expansion influenced by exogenous factors like mergers and acquisition of other companies, business development as encompasses a number of techniques designed to grow an enterprise. Such techniques include assessments of marketing opportunities and target markets intelligence gathering on customers and competitors, generating leads for possible sales, follows up sales activity, e.t.c Successful business development often requires a multiple disciplinary approach beyond just a sale to customer.

For a firm to have a sustainable growth and development, the significance of marketing, money and the management of resources should be a high focus for the enterprise.