Approaching Growth Strategically
Approach growth strategically
One way to avoid unwittingly falling into traps is to plan for controlled growth. Of course, you can expand your business without a plan, making changes piecemeal using trial and error. But this approach is fraught with danger. Small business owners all too frequently abandon the practice of planning once they are through their start-up phase. They forget to update their business plan, ignore the need to review the fundamentals of their business performance regularly and to set new goals. But, if your business is truly to thrive, you will need to work strategically.
Strategic planning is not an activity reserved for large organisations. – it is the single most important managerial task of any company that wants to influence its future. There are several key elements involved in a strategic plan:
Vision
– This is the ultimate destination that you want your business venture to achieve. In business planning, your vision is described concisely in a few sentences often called a ‘mission statement’. This states exactly where you want to get to by simultaneously defining the core of your business – what you do, how and where you do it and so on – and describing what your competitive advantage is – what is special about your business that will enable it to succeed. Three key elements to include in your mission statement:
- What type and range of products or services do you offer?
- Who do you plan to target as your potential customers?
- What benefits to customers make your business competitive?
Goals and Objectives – Unlike your vision which is essentially timeless, these should be written out and revised annually or when you decide to make significant changes in the route your business is taking. Writing effective goals and objectives is a bit tricky. They need to be more specific than mission statements but not include the specific tasks that will actually be carried out. Yet, they also need to be concrete rather than vague. You will need to know when you have achieved them. For example, ‘improve customer relations’ is too vague. How will you know when they are better? How much improvement are you aiming for – a little or a lot? What type of improvement is needed – faster service or fewer complaints?
Tasks – Task statements are relatively easy to write. They simply need to describe the actions that will be taken. Of course, they should be clear and complete but their main purpose is to list specific actions. As you turn your task statements into a full action plan, you’ll need to add a deadline by which the task should be complete. You will also need to assign responsibility to someone for carrying out the task. If the task will cost money, then a budget will need to be determined.
© 2009 "Start Small, Grow Big" Barbara Mowat and Ted James, with the contribution of William Erichson on Chapter 6, "Financing A Growing Business". All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, amended, modified, edited, transmitted in any form, or translated in any way without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. www.ImpactCommunicationsLtd.com.
