A Good Time to Expand the Empire

Last night I attended another EO event where this time a panel of experts tried to help these entrepreneur's re-evaluate the best ways to handle this economy. It was a very interesting Q&A session and some of the experts did a stellar job at pointing these business people in the right direction.
Questions kept getting brought up regarding the "cutting of costs" - something I hear quite often and probably since it resonated I decided to ask a question of the experts - "is it better to cut costs or to grow revenues since they can accomplish the same thing, shouldn't entrepreneurs spend at least as much time thinking about ways to grow their business as they do thinking about ways to shave a few dollars off by cutting expenditures?"
as I expected the panel agreed with the question and proceeded to point out the benefits of growth over stagnation. Now is the time to attack the competition, improve your services, refine your vision, assess your people. re-negotiate leases, even borrow money and take advantage of the economic climate - its a great time to be in business.
The Roman Emperor Trajan is known in history as the man that expanded the Roman empire to become the biggest it had been at a time when others might have - and did decide to sit back and leave things as they were - why. Because even 2000 years ago expansion of an empire resulted in revenue increases that allowed him to resolve the same issues that would have caused others to not expand.
So what is your plan? Good business sense always includes a plan for growth that is not dependent on anything else that is happening in the economy - you are either growing or shrinking your respective portion of the pie regardless of how big the pie is.