How to Write a Growth Plan for Your Small Business
By admin
Most business owners hate making plans.
Yes, they want to grow their businesses and have a million ways to go about getting it done, but sitting down to create a business growth plan is a NO.
In this article, we share how to write a business growth plan and some of the benefits of creating a growth plan for your business.
Benefits of Writing a Business Growth Plan
Here are three (3) reasons you need to write a growth plan for your small business:
- A business growth plan is a roadmap that helps your business achieve its goals for the future.
- It makes the business goals of expansion to new markets and increasing sales and profit clear to everyone involved.
- It keeps you on track and equipped to handle the challenges of growing your business.
How to Write a Growth Plan for your Small Business
Writing a growth plan for your small business is similar to writing a business plan.
To write a business growth plan for your small business, here are a few steps you can follow:
1. Evaluate the current state of your business
The first step in writing a growth plan for your business is to identify where your business is right now.
A good evaluation of your business’s current state will go a long way in ensuring success.
As part of your evaluation, you want to identify your current customers, your distinct value proposition, and where you generate most of your revenue.
A good tool that will make your evaluation easier is the SWOT Analysis. It means Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat.
Conducting this exercise as well as other factors as stated above will give you a clear picture of your business’s current strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.
2. Choose an area of growth to focus on
Conducting a SWOT analysis will reveal that your business has a variety of opportunities for growth, such as expanding to new markets, selling products to existing markets, and so on.
Your job in this step is to identify a growth opportunity that best suits your business and stick to it.
3. Research the feasibility of your growth focus
The next step is to determine the feasibility of your growth strategy.
If you look at how your competitors and other businesses have implemented it in the past and other markets, you will have a better idea of your chances for success.
4. Set your growth goals & metrics for measurement
Write out what Overall growth goals you want your business to achieve in the next 2 to 5 years. And break down those goals into quarterly and yearly periods.
It is also critical that you write out how you intend to measure the performance of your business towards achieving your growth objectives and break down the roles and responsibilities so everyone knows what they are accountable for.
5. Define what is required to achieve your growth goals
Successfully growing a business requires money, employees, time, etc.
Unless you understand what is required to make your plan work, you are bound to fail, no matter how beautiful it sounds.
Make a list of all the costs involved in growth, including the capital, talent, time, etc. And define how you intend to bridge that gap.
6. Document the business growth plan
The final step is putting everything you have done in the first six steps into a growth plan document.
The business growth plan document will include the following:
- An executive summary
- A description of the current state of your business
- Outline the growth opportunities, threats and requirements you got via the SWOT analysis in step one above.
- A clear outline of your growth goals for the period
- Information about your team
- And your financial plan highlighting the financial requirement for growth, sources of funding and projection, etc.
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