How many companies have you come in to contact with today?

Think about it for a moment – you have the various businesses advertising on the television as you eat breakfast in the morning, the radio adverts pushing services.

You then have adverts in the bank when you pop in to draw out some cash, a myriad different ads online as you log in to your online mail account, and the hundreds of thousands of services which are pushed at you as you queue in the supermarket, or pop in to the shopping centre to pick something up.

One thing we are not short of in the West is business.

Everywhere we look, from the back of a local cab company right through to our shopping bag, we are invited to put our loyalty and trust in the hands of a company and use their services.

In every industry we choose to make a purchase with, we are faced with a selection of options that is enough to make us hesitate unless we know exactly what we want, and whom we want to buy it from.

This is why industries are changing.

Instead of people offering us disparate services which only answer one element of our overall purchasing requirements, more and more companies are seizing upon the idea of a holistic practice, where they offer a ‘one stop shop’ for their customers who can enter their company and get all they need from a single service provider.

Without having to shop around, we can now find a company we trust, and use them for most of our purchasing needs in a single industry for the first time.

Let’s take your local supermarket as an example.

Places like Tesco have become so huge that you can do your banking, take out insurance, pick up ingredients for a stir-fry and top up your mobile all at the same time. Other companies who are savvy enough to see that we are all stretched for time have taken this one step further – they now offer complete service packages which do everything for you, letting you simply brief them, pay your money, and sit back and watch everything happen before your very eyes, with minimal input.

As we have less and less time, this is a business model which is proving to be extremely effective.

Take for example a company that does wedding photography. More and more, we find that they are offering insurance for the big day, flower arranging, a site to view pictures, as well as the event planning itself.

These companies are realizing the benefit of offering a single portal for a wide range of services, recognizing that when someone trusts them and likes their primary service, they are more likely to come back for other services through the company.

To stay ahead of your game, is it worth broadening your sphere of business. I’m not suggesting you widen your own expertise – it’s proven that customers trust people more, in fact, when they narrow down their niche and offer one single product or service at which they excel.

However, by linking with trusted suppliers in your field of industry, and perhaps in your local area, you’re able to give your customers a truly holistic ‘one stop shop’ which saves them time and effort.