The Growth Challenge As Velez sat on her flight to Sao Paulo, she thought about her ambitious expansion goal of growing company revenues from R$166 million to over R$1 billion in three years. So far, Beleza Natural had grown by opening new institutes in different cities one at a time and relying on word of mouth to generate traffic. Over the course of the coming years, Beleza was planning to accelerate the rate of opening new institutes. The question was whether this was enough to enable the company to achieve its expansion goals or whether more aggressive steps to foster growth were needed. Based on the advice Velez had received from some of the investors, she was contemplating several possible courses of action: 1. Launch a new mass-media advertising campaign promoting the company's products and services to its target customers. The goal would be to make potential customers aware of Beleza Natural and visually demonstrate how beautiful their hair would look after Beleza's treatment. To this end, Beleza would start advertising in new markets using television, print, and billboards. 2. Start actively promoting Beleza's services to men with afro hair. Given that Beleza's proprietary technology worked effectively on all afro hair, regardless of gender, expanding the customer base to men with curly hair seemed a logical next step to grow the business. This would also help preempt competitors from entering the men's market and using it as a springboard for expanding to the women's market that was currently Beleza's core business. 3. Begin offering a broader range of services, including straightening of curly hair. Styling straight hair is one of the most popular styling services and could help increase consumer demand as well as boost Beleza's profit margins. An added benefit of this option is that hair straightening has to be repeated in the salon more frequently than treating curly hair. 4. Streamline the scheduling to reduce the waiting time before treatment begins to less than fifteen minutes. Indeed, time was a scarce commodity for many of Beleza Natural's customers and shortening the wait to less than fifteen minutes could be a way for Beleza to show that it cared about its customers and understood their needs. 5. Offer Beleza Natural's proprietary maintenance products outside the institutes in retail stores. Beleza Natural's maintenance kits were designed to last one month, but clients often ran out of their maintenance products because they shared them with other female family members and friends who did not have the means to visit an institute. Offering Beleza Natural's products in a broad range of retail outlets could help attenuate this problem and bring in new revenue