You have performed all the necessary steps for registering your business in Canada. You have been in business for a while, though you are looking to expand still. What can be done in order to expand your business in Canada?
You have spent some time in business, acquiring new customers, developing a market for your goods or services. What is the next logical step? It is to grow your business. But you might ask how to do that. That is a good question, and we will attempt to answer it here.
Growing your business takes time, effort, and energy.
Think of a business like growing a plant. It requires your attention, and if you do not provide it with the proper resources, it will not grow. The same is true of a business, although the ingredients are different.
There are several key ingredients to grow a business.
One crucial objective is to define what it is that you want to achieve. If you do not have a clear goal as to what you want to achieve, then you will likely end up in the same place you were before without any business growth. You will also have additional frustration that your business has not grown. So, the suggestion here is to write goals down. Make the goals specific and driven by time. If I were making a business goal, it might be to increase sales. But that is not a good enough goal. The goal needs to be more specific than that.
“My business will achieve a 5% increase in profit this year” is a good start.
But then, the question becomes how to achieve that.
And you must be more specific than that, even, because breaking it down into small steps is crucial as well.
You might add: “My business will achieve a 5% increase in profit this year by 1. Obtaining three new clients; 2. Making sure existing clients are happy by reaching out to them at least once a month if no prior contact is initiated; 3. Improving marketing efforts by writing a weekly blog post; and 4. Increasing the value of my product by investing in employees through creating new training modules.”
This is an example in which the goals are much more specific.
Another key to expanding your business in Canada is to think about hiring employees (if you haven’t already).
For example, on the Small Business British Columbia webpage, they suggest tips such as “writing a killer job description” and also that “training is everything.” They also suggest to “plan for growth.”
Writing a job description can be challenging, since it is something not all of us have thought about at one time in our business careers. How do you write a job description, then?
You should think about conciseness in a job description. But you should make sure to list all relevant duties to make sure that the person who will potentially be working for you knows everything involved. Think of it as a time-saver. I think all of us know that if someone is working in a job where they do not understand what the job duties are, they are likely to become frustrated. And that is a waste of time on their part. It can also cause a lack of efficiency in your business.
So, the key to that is writing a job description that is bound to make the right candidates show up for the interviewing and hiring process.
Make sure to pay close attention to the tax implications of hiring employees, as well.
Now, I will transition to how this specifically applies to the industry of translation services.
What is the translation services industry?
Translation services include many different subareas such as interpretation, written translation, sworn translation, document translation, etc. But on the whole, you are going to need expert linguists to complete duties on a regular basis. Think about how you can hire employees or contractors that can meet the demands of this rapidly growing industry. By way of example, in the United States, the translation services sector is set to grow rapidly in the coming years (according to the webpage www.onetonline.org, a website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor). Of course, Canada’s market might look slightly different because of the increased presence of different languages (i.e., French), but the translation services market is still set to grow worldwide in the coming years.
In terms of growing your business in the translation services industry, what can you do?
A first tip is to hire professionals with experience translating the kinds of documents you would like to be translated. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it can be difficult if you are trying to grow a business. As alluded to in the prior section on hiring employees, if you do not know who to hire, you are not going to be able to grow your business in a way that is sustainable and ultimately profitable and healthy for your bottom line, (i.e., profit).
Hiring employees aside, there are other considerations you must take into account while growing your business in Canada. In translation services, for example, you will need to define which services you will offer. Are your services primarily document translation? Legal translation? Interpretation? If it is interpretation, will you send contractors to a specific site to perform their duties or will it be over the telephone or video conferencing software? Will the employees be in-house, or will they be independent contractors? All of these questions have implications as to how your day-to-day operations will look. This is because if a specific area of the translation services industry is chosen by your business, you will need resources to support these employees or contractors. For example, if you, as the leader of your business, desire to go into the field of legal translation in Canada, you will first need highly competent legal translators who have an expert-level knowledge of the source language and source content, but you will also need people who are reliable. So, knowing the requirements for fields such as that is an extremely important step that some people might overlook when attempting to grow their translation services business.
You will also need to know how to support translators in the event that they have a question about a document they are translating (or any other question regarding the performance of the task that is assigned to any linguistic specialist). Overall, translators are fairly autonomous, generally speaking, but there are occasions on which they will have a question about a document that warrants explanation. You will need qualified project managers in order to answer their questions. These project managers usually will need to have had significant experience in the translation services industry that leads to their expertise.
Chances are, if you consider all of these areas before attempting to grow your business substantially, you will at least give yourself the possibility of being successful in growing your translation services business and this is required hiring a professional translation vendor like Future Group.
Personally, I recommend writing down answers to all of the questions we have considered here. For example, you could tailor a job description for your own company. By this, I mean that you should definitely write multiple drafts of a job description. You should think about it in the eyes of a potential employee. How would they perceive certain language that you employ in the job description? Does it sound like your company is professional? Does it sound too colloquial for a job description? Perhaps, answering these questions will give you a better idea on how to expand your business by hiring new employees.
Now that we have covered how to hire employees, we must consider how you as the executive must support them.
It is thus important to think about how you can support your employees. Yes, it is necessary as an executive or someone who runs the company to support your employees. You probably already know this, but I emphasize it here.
How will you strategically support your employees? How does that fit into the overall strategy of your business plan or marketing plan? These are questions you might want to consider when expanding your business efforts in Canada.
Wages are just one way of supporting employees. You should think (and do not be afraid to be creative) about other ways in which you can support your employees such as the fact that they will want to be inspired to work for your company. How can you create that inspiration for them to come work for your company? Aside from paying a healthy wage, this is a question that a lot of executives do not consider enough. Your company culture must make your business feel like a desirable place to work. If day-to-day operations are not thought about in this way, this could waste precious resources such as time and money because you might have high turnover in employees and other costly problems that will waste your potential energy.
Here, I hope to have shown some ways in which you can expand your translation services business in Canada, highlighting key business strategies that can grow any business of any size.