As a business owner, it can be easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. However, to ensure success, you must be looking ahead and planning for growth. To do that, many business owners write a business growth plan, which creates a timeline for the next 1 to 2 years on increasing revenue.
To write an effective business growth plan, you must understand what it is, the types of growth strategies to consider, and how to project ways to grow your revenue.
Business Growth Plan Defined
A business growth plan is an outline of where you see your company in the next 1 to 2 years. You should format your growth plan along with each quarter. Then, at the end of each quarter, you can review the plan and determine what goals were met versus what goals were not met. Then, you can revise your growth plan to reflect the current market.
Why are they important?
There are several reasons why business growth plans are so important:
Reveals market share/penetration
Recoups early losses
Minimizes future risk
Creates concrete revenue plans
3 Factors that Affect Business Growth
Several factors can affect your business growth, such as:
Leadership
Management
Customer Loyalty
4 Major Business Growth Strategies
There are lots of different business growth strategies, but there are only four major classifications. You can use these to determine how to build your brand:
Market Strategy
Development of products/services
Product strategy
Diversification
What Should You Include in a Business Growth Plan?
A business growth plan is specifically focused on expansion and how you plan to achieve it. While it will take some time and effort to create a useful plan, your efforts will pay off by keeping you on track. Following are the elements you should include in your business growth plan:
Description of opportunities for expansion
Financial goals are broken down by year and quarter
Marketing plan for how you will grow
A financial plan to determine available capital during growth
Breakdown of staffing needs/responsibilities
8 Steps for Writing a Business Growth Plan
To create a business growth plan, you will need to do some research and engage in forwarding thinking. Here are the 8 steps for writing a business growth plan.
Think Ahead
While it’s true that the future is unpredictable if you take the time to get to know your target market, and your competition, and consider past growth, you can plan for expansion.
Study Other Growth Plans
Before you get started with writing your business growth plan, you’ll want to review models from successful companies.
Discover Growth Opportunities
With a little bit of research, you can discover where your expansion opportunities are and once you figure those out, you can include them in your business growth plan.
Evaluate Your Team
Your business growth plan needs to also include an assessment of your team and staffing requirements to meet your goals. By assessing your skills, as well as those of your current team, you can determine how much expansion can be accomplished. This will also reveal to you when you should start hiring more staff and the skill sets you should look for in your new hires.
Find the Capital
Make sure to include detailed information on how you intend to fund your expansion.
Get the Word Out
Business growth requires targeted marketing efforts. Make sure that you include an explanation of how you plan to market your business to encourage growth and how those efforts will change as you grow.
Ask for Help
If you need help, talk to other business owners who have had successful business growth. This can be very important for writing an effective growth plan.
Start Writing
Finally, you can use business plan software to write your growth plan.
Conclusion
As a business owner, you often get caught up in the daily activities of running your business. However, this can cause your business to become stagnant. You must look to the future and plan for growth. A business growth plan can help. If you need help writing your business growth plan, contact WCK Financial- we have the tools and the know-how to help you.