Published: January 9th, 2015; By: Judi Hughes
Many business owners plan to grow; few plan for growth!
By this I mean business owners plan to increase revenue through increased sales and increasing numbers of customers but few plan “how” they will achieve that increase and, even more important, “how” they will support the increase in business.
Yes you do need to grow revenue and customers but that is only half the story. You also need to grow the infrastructure and team so that the company can support the increase in business. Nothing is more deadly than a company that has more business than it can support. Things fall between the cracks; client service suffers; customers leave never to return; the operation implodes.
And to add challenges on top of those challenges, as the business grows it becomes more complex and more difficult to manage.
So how do you manage this increased complexity? How do you ensure the growth in revenue and clients is supported by the growth in delivery and support capability? By planning! By creating a strategic plan that takes ALL aspects of your business into account. By planning for growth, which includes:
- Building and managing your team
- Creating new products/services for your ideal client
- Setting in place and monitoring financial controls (you don’t want to run out of money!)
- Building a customer service program and measuring its effectiveness
- Systemizing the operation to enable you to scale the business
- Implementing key performance indicators to track the progress of your business growth
- Finding and attending professional development programs to prepare yourself for managing an increasingly complex business
- Creating a marketing engine that provides a consistent flow of qualified prospects
- Using technology to ensure cost/effective delivery of your service or product
The Strategic Plan becomes your road map for growth. It identifies your measurable 3 to 5 year growth objectives and links them to 1 year strategies and actions. You can track your growth on a day by day, week by week and month by month basis. This is a powerful tool because it keeps you on track and lets you know when corrective action is required.
Our handbook Plan for Success steps you through the process of preparing to plan, creating the plan and then most important executing the plan. To download Plan for Success click here. In the handbook we share with you the planning methodology we have used to build a number of successful companies and the one we use when planning with all our clients. And so we know it works!
So don’t wait for a miracle to take your company to the next level. As Peter Drucker wrote; “Miracles are great but they are so unpredictable”. Instead, plan for growth!
