Growth. It’s on the minds of most business owners every day. How to grow and how to fund growth are subjects many business owners wrestle with; some successfully, some less so.
But what can you do to increase your chances of achieving growth and getting the crucial funding you’ll need to make your plan work? The answer is simple: talk to a specialist. Just as you’re a specialist in your own business sector, we’re specialists in ours, and one of our areas of expertise is planning for growth.
We use a tried and tested process that will help you achieve the growth you’re looking for and which will help you find the funding you need from the best sources. We’ll come back to funding in a future article, so keep checking back to see what we’ve got to say about it.
Planning for growth requires a few distinct steps.
Firstly, you need to do some fact-finding. What is it you’re trying to achieve? Why? And how does it fit with your business model and your personal objectives as the business owner? Once you’ve been able to articulate your growth objectives, you can start to move to the next step.
Planning is one of the most important parts of your growth ambitions. Looking carefully at your options and objectives, we help you map out your growth strategy providing the foundation to build your growth plans upon. We look at what you want to achieve and where your business could be in five years’ time taking both cultural and commercial viewpoints into consideration.
From your overall strategy, we’ll then create a first year plan, intended to give you the initial steps to get the right elements of your business in place for the growth you’re trying to achieve: a sound basis for reliable decision making. Things like pricing systems and key performance indicators (KPIs) may seem straightforward but we’ll tune them specifically for your business and your growth objectives to provide the maximum benefit and insight into what your business is doing and how it performs.
Going forward, we’ll turn your strategy into a practical plan (for example, a five-year plan), operationalising the first 12 months and engaging the professionals you need for each of the disciplines required along the way. You might need additional input on succession planning, tax planning or business continuity, so we’ll identify the right people from our team of specialists and bring them on-board.
Monitoring the plan and measuring progress is a vitally important part of your growth strategy. That’s why we’ll monitor progress and KPIs on a quarterly basis with you. We can also carry out a systemic review every month depending on the scale of growth and budgets involved, to make sure the plans and systems in place are working for you.
What you get is a proven process for growth, geared specifically to your objectives, which our clients, their partners and their banks all love. Many professionals can offer you parts of this process but few, if any, can take such an all-encompassing approach.
Contact us today to make your business grow and find out just what we can do for you.