If you’re a new business owner, you’ve certainly spent time thinking about how to improve your success. There are plenty of things to try, but the best way is with a solid plan.
The University of Technology Sydney estimates that 1 in 3 new Australian small business fail within their first year, while 2 of 4 fail by the end of their second year. If you’d like to defy the odds, you’re going to need an adaptable, thorough plan.
Specifically, you need a business growth plan. In this article, we’ll break down exactly what that is and how it can help.
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What Is A Business Growth Plan?
A business growth plan gives you the tools to plan and track your business revenue thoroughly. It enables you to be efficient in creating new revenues by targeting the values a customer sees. With the strategies of your growth plan, you can rise above your competition.
Whether your business is in a period of negative growth or you’re looking to double your profits, there are strategies to achieve your goals in only a matter of months. All of these strategies are discussed in the process of building your business growth plan.
Business growth plans are intentionally created without a need to increase your marketing budget, yet still aim to double net profit. This may seem impossible, but the outcome is achieved time and time again.
With our growth planning process, we’ll cover:
- Your business and life dreams
- Detailed business goals
- Best strategies to achieve the above
Without utilizing professional advisors to generate a business growth plan, you run the risk of missing out on excellent opportunities to see your business succeed.
Benefits Of A Business Growth Plan
A business growth plan is great for new companies or older businesses who have found themselves in a slump. It’s difficult to constantly monitor the market conditions and react accordingly, especially if you don’t have strategies in place to respond. But with a growth plan, you’ll be ready.
The benefits of having implementing a business growth plan are numerous! A few key benefits are:
- Short-Term: The outline typically follows 1 to 2 years of your business, broken down for each quarter. You’ll reap the rewards of your plan in no time.
- Adaptable: Since the plan follows each quarter, you’ll be able to easily to see the goals that were met and missed. From there, you can revise your plan to reflect market conditions.
- Intuitive: The plan focuses on current market conditions, so you’ll be able to calculate exactly how to implement your strategy.
A good business growth plan is intuitive and adaptable, always focusing on what’s currently happening in the present market.
It allows you to pair your goals and strategies with coherent measures that directly impact clients. It both protects your existing revenue while generating new revenue.
Where To Start? What To Consider?
When developing a business growth plan, it’s important to know where to begin. You’ll need to start by asking yourself three basic questions: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? How do you get there?
These questions examine:
- Current Position: You begin with an established set of resources. You examine what’s working and what’s not.
- Future Position: The point you want your business at in the future (think 1 to 2 years). Here, you want to have a different set of capabilities and resources for your business.
- Bridging the Gap: The strategies you’ll use to get to your desired future position.
After you’ve thought about these questions, it’s time to really break down your plan. A typical business growth plan includes:
- Detailed account of opportunities to expand
- Quarterly and yearly financial goals broken down
- Marketing plans for achieving growth
- A financial plan to figure out the capital accessible during growth
- Staffing needs and when to hire based on the growth goal figures set
To stay on top of your business growth plan, you’ll need to think ahead, and it will be beneficial to study other growth plans. This is why outsourcing help with your plan to a trusted consultant can be a great investment.
Having an expert on your side will give you the background knowledge and resources available for a successful plan.
Types Of Growth Strategies
Businesses have a myriad of growth strategies available to them, but there are four major kinds. With the big four, you’ll expertly discover how to build up your brand:
- Development: This strategy looks at methods to put your services and products into a brand-new market. If you’re struggling to grow in your current market, expanding to a new one may be the perfect goal.
- Diversification: This focuses on expanding your products and your target markets. It’s great for smallish companies who have the ability to be flexible with what they offer and what new markets they try to tap into.
- Market strategy: This is how you plan to reach your target clientele. It’s not for tapping into new markets or creating new services to increase market shares. Rather, you’ll aim to leverage your current offerings.
- Product strategy: Also known as product development, this strategy focuses on new services and products to target your present market. You develop ways to grow your business without entering new markets and analyze what your customers are asking for.
Business Growth Planning Vs. Traditional Business Planning
While writing a growth plan is similar to penning a traditional business plan, the two do differ. With a traditional business plan, you generate a wish list of what you’d like to see, but the strategies to achieve those are put on the back burner.
A growth plan is keyed into the expansion of your business and how you intend to achieve it. It can take time, but the effort can pay off significantly by remaining on top of your growth efforts.
You’ll be able to boost you net profit margin without needing to increase your sales or income. Plus, the strategies within one are meant to be implemented quickly.
Conclusion — Is A Business Growth Plan Right For You?
Investing in your growth is beneficial for both solo operators and those who desire their presently-stagnant company to boom.
A well-constructed growth proposal allows you to take advantage of turbulent changes in buying patterns, helps you understand the need for pursuing results systematically, and sets significant priorities.
