Once your business is running well, you may be looking to take the next step and grow your business.

You can grow your business to improve quality or to increase your profit potential.

Improving quality can also increase your profit potential, for example if you buy a better tour bus you could charge more for your tours, though sometimes you need to improve the quality just to keep pace with your competitors, and meet your customers expectations.

There are a number of prompters that could indicate it is time to grow your business, these include:

• Customer feedback - you may collect feedback formally on customer feedback forms or through general discussion with your customers. Many of the best suggestions for improvements will come from your customers.
• Declining bookings are a sign that your product may not be living up to expectations, you may need to look to improve your quality to keep up with your competitors.
• You need to increase income or decrease expenses to maintain or increase profit potential.
• Changes in the market place such as a tourism boom in your town, or closing down of a competitors business, could indicate that it is time to grow your business.
• Annual reviews in your off peak time are a good way of reassessing you business, and ensuring it is the best it can be. Often it is good to do this in conjunction with writing your annual business plan.
• Unexpected opportunities present themselves for example a grant or subsidy is offered for something that could improve your business, or, a major tour company wants to include your on their itinerary but you will need to purchase three more cabins.

Before committing yourself to any growth initiatives, you should identify exactly what you would like to achieve by growing your business, and list what the benefits will be to you, and your business. Be clear as to whether you are doing it to improve quality or to increase your profitability. Plan your growth as you did your initial business start up:

• Review your financial position, factoring in any costs associated with your planned growth initiatives to assess the financial implications.
• Research how other businesses have achieved similar outcomes by reading our case studies.
• Set business goals for your planned growth initiatives.
• For growth initiatives which require a significant investment of time or money, review and update your business plan or do separate business plan for each new initiative.
• Get the additional skills you need by attending training.
• Set a deadline and make it happen.

www.business.gov.au covers a wide range of business topics relevant to existing businesses.  They provide key information and links through to other business assistance websites for information about e-business, employing people, fair trading, insurance, research, OH&S, regulatory information and taxation.

Queensland Tourism has published a helpful Tour Operator Tool Kit (click on 'download Tour Operator Tool Kit, which opens up a PDF, and see page 26) which has an interesting section on growing a tour business, though many of the concepts can be applied to any tourism business.