Owning Your Niche Market

Expanding and Growing Your Business During Uncertain Times

- Kirk Waldfogel

Starting and growing a business are always challenges, even without a global pandemic knocking on your door. It often comes down to fostering a delicate balance — a balance between trusting your own passions and abilities while also trusting others to help you bring those passions to life in a functional, scalable way; a balance between expanding into other markets while still staying true to those markets that got you where you are; a balance between work and life itself. Establishing — and properly maintaining — that balance during uncertain times will not only help you successfully start a business but also help you successfully run and grow it.

Set Goals

First and foremost, those setting out on a new venture need to set goals. When we talk about setting goals for any business — new or longstanding — there's an adage in business to ensure business goals are “SMART”; meaning they are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Realistic

• Timely

Whether you’re working on year-end goals, monthly goals, or other short- and long-term goals, they should be fairly specific but well-rounded enough that you're improving yourself and the business at the same time — financially, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Either way, it's essential to make these goals tangible so that, whether you succeed or fail, you'll be able to take something away from the experience. As you start to look at what's working and what isn't, you're in the perfect position to start thinking of your goals not only in terms of how you'll achieve them but also in terms of who can help you get there.