Business growth plan

The business growth plan or overall growth action plan aims to give you clarity on how to grow your business at the best possible time. By now you may think that you have already created enough planning strategies in your business plan and so on, but the business growth plan does not have to be a task that consumes large amounts of time and resources.

When you compare the time this plan can take with the benefits it brings, it becomes clear why you won't want to skip it. I advise you to start creating your business growth plan by setting aside a day or two for planning, where you focus on marketing, more specifically advertising, promotion and other aspects that can function as starting points for the expansion of your venture.

To this end you can meet with your team, business mentors or other like-minded people and conduct brainstorming or networking sessions to assist you in your growth plans.

Steps for the business growth plan

To make putting together your business growth plan easier, here are the strategic steps you should follow:

Vision statement:

• First, you will begin by examining the vision statement you have chosen for your business. Your business vision is the foundation for any business growth planning. Your vision can be as broad and all-encompassing as you want it to be, such as doubling your sales or positioning yourself as the best quality company in the industry at any level.
• The vision statement usually has a time component, where you state the time frame in which you want to see your goals accomplished, in 1,3,5 or more years. This vision is for you and your company, not for customers.

Business evaluation:

• After reevaluating your vision statement you must then evaluate your business. To perform this evaluation you must first determine the objectives or purposes of your business and evaluate if you have met them or are in the process of completing them yet.
• You have to analyze the core situation of your venture. For this, take as a framework of analysis the 3 main strengths of the business and the 3 weaknesses. This can be more easily discerned with the SWOT analysis of the business.
• You must then relate the strengths and weaknesses you identified to the time frames you used in your vision statement.
• Use your strengths to predict how your business will be in one or more years because of them.
• Analyze how the identified weaknesses may impede your company's growth.
• Keep all of this in mind so that you then compile the three main elements of your business that you feel it is most vital to focus on in order to realize your vision in different time frames (1, 3 or 5 years).

Example: For this example let's assume you run a life coaching company and your primary products are 3 published books and your business as such.

Your vision statement is: "double your sales and gain international recognition for your product".

The strengths you identified in this case are:

• The intrinsic characteristics of your product. Your books are of a high quality, so customers appreciate them with a lot of positivity and this also sets it apart from the competition.

• You have a high positioning in your area and great reach with your books. Customers are very satisfied and remain loyal to your company. All the customers who bought the first book, also bought the others.

In the case of weaknesses you found that:

• You don't present much attraction for new customers. The same customers stay with you, but you gain very few new ones.

• The products you market are not well known outside your area and your promotional efforts have not been as fruitful as you have wanted them to be.

Analysis:

• In this phase you collect the evaluation data and analyze the relationship of your vision statement to the strengths and weaknesses of your business in the time frames you chose.
• I advise you to write down on a piece of paper or computer, what you should focus on for the completion of your goals, whether it is increasing your sales or international recognition.

• In this example you could write down things like marketing, promotion, sales strategies on social platforms.

• Once you get to this step, you can stop and give yourself time for reflection and analysis. Allow your brain to work passively on digesting the ideas so that your next meeting will be more fruitful.

Planning: Now that you know what you want to focus on, your next session will be tasked with coming up with ideas on how you can make your goals a reality. This is the way you move from the abstract part of the plan to the practical part and establish the actions you need to take to get to where you want to be in the given time frame:

• You will start with the priorities you established in the previous phase, which are the most suitable for the fulfillment of your vision.

• Organize these priorities from the most important to the least important and focus on the first one.

• List all the actions that you and your team can think of to solve that priority. Don't dismiss any idea, even if it seems unhelpful.

• It is much more effective to have partners at this stage, as other people may have ideas that you would not think of.

• In case you have decided to focus on marketing, brainstorm on how to use your promotional actions to achieve your goals.

• You can use tools such as creating a podcast, a blog or a website for your business in case you don't have one.

• You could also start an e-mailing campaign, pay for ads on social platforms, use paid search engine optimization. The possibilities are almost unlimited, it is up to you and your company to choose the one you consider most effective.

Develop the action plan: Once you have thoroughly analyzed all the ideas provided in your sessions, it is then time to develop a concrete action plan. In this phase of the growth plan you channel all the ideas into a detailed action plan:

• You accumulate and review all the ideas contributed and choose the ones that seem most useful and feasible to you.
• Do not eliminate those that you do not think are useful, as you may change your mind in the future. Later on, as situations change, an unfeasible idea may become a viable one.
• Try to summarize the list of ideas as much as possible, until only the most important ones remain.
• Analyze if there is a pattern or similarity among these action plans to further focus your efforts.
• Then, using your concentrated ideas, delimit the first actions to make them a reality.
• Once you have established an action, you must also establish both the specific action you are going to take and the time frame in which you plan to accomplish it.
• You should not disregard the use of dates and deadlines, as these support you in evaluating your progress. If you do not pay attention to your time frames, most of the time you will stretch yourself longer than you initially thought.
• Your chosen budget is very important, and you must stick to it, or you will make the mistake of overspending.

Examples: You can use these examples as a guide to make your action plan:

• I will achieve international recognition for my product or service through the development of an e-business by January 1, 2023.

• I will increase the recognition of my products or services in the international framework through a Facebook marke