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When running a small business or a startup, the business owner must do much of the legwork for themselves. This means that much of the success of the company is dependent upon the owner’s ability. The owner must be able to make strategic decisions about growth strategies.

Entrepreneur Magazine says that while you may own a small business now, planning for long-term growth means looking at the scenario where you won’t always be a small business. With the right planning and implementation, the entrepreneurial steps you take now may result in a multinational conglomerate tomorrow. To plan for successful growth on that scale, you can look some mega-corporations that began as small businesses.

Look at Microsoft for Growth Strategies

An especially ubiquitous small-business-turned-next-generation behemoth is Google. Combined with its parent company, Alphabet, Google is worth a roughly $1 trillion. Plus, the company is so influential that the term “Google” is now a verb in the dictionary!

If you’re a small business owner or startup looking to emulate the success of Google and other major growth-oriented companies, consider these three tips for growth strategies. They could help your company replicate the Google strategy to achieve growth, attract investments, and create organizational success.

Differentiate

One of the best growth strategies is to create a business model that is distinguishable from competitors. You should consider offering a product or solution no one else is.

As for Google, it’s not the only search algorithm available. There is Bing, Yahoo!, and a host of others. However, none of these do what Google does nearly as well because Google differentiates itself with a search algorithm that is constantly learning, evolving, and developing. Google’s growth strategies center on providing users with the absolute best results rather than of the most results.

Google has charted a course for quality, not quantity, and they’ve been rewarded for their attention to a market need. Likewise, your product doesn’t have to be totally new. What’s important is that you develop an aspect of your business that is new. Instead of simply replicating previously successful businesses, you must create elements of a new model that will anticipate a market need that doesn’t currently exist. Do this, and you’ll be on the road to steady growth.

Expand into New Areas

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has its fingers in a lot of pies. The reach of Alphabet is spread across a number of industries. They also own some surprisingly major products and services, such as YouTube, the GPS app Waze, the exercising wearable textile brand Fitbit, to name just a few.

Entrepreneurs shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket. If your small business revolves around a single product, business model or selling strategy, your growth strategies should include considering what to do when the market need for that stagnates or dies up. This is the way that a lot of startups fail. They get angel investment with hopes of turning their idea into a budding national company, but they stumble after spending all of their funds on a single, unattractive business model. You should, instead, look at diversifying your business and solving a number of needs for your target market.

Excel at Your Market Niche

While successful companies like Google understand that diversification and expansion are critical, they also must keep the actual value as a business top of mind. That is to provide excellent search results to millions and millions of users each day.

A company must consider expansion and diversification to guard against the possibility that an idea won’t succeed. But once a company lands on an idea that does work and it connects with an audience that wants more of it, it’s essential to work in that niche to be a top market player.

Growth Strategies Takeaway

The primary takeaway for startups and entrepreneurs that want to reproduce the growth strategies of Google is elementary. Growth is all about learning, and the more a business studies the growth trends and systems of market titans such as Google, the more prepared you will be when your business is set for its next growth stage.

Differentiating your business model, expanding into new markets, and excelling at the services and goods you provide allows a business to be successful in its growth.