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Develop a Business Strategy to Grow Your Business....Business Strategy
Starting a business can be difficult - making it grow can be a problem. In the first year you will be getting on with the business of following your start- up business strategy. Keeping your head down, controlling cash, meeting targets, winning and keeping customers with brilliant customer service. In the second year, you'll hopefully want to come up for air and take stock of the situation. You may well want to re-visit your business plan, assess your trading progress, customer base and consider your future business strategy for future growth. You will want to be thinking and starting to plan how your business will grow. This is the start of developing a long term business strategy and you will need to re-visit and adjust this plan many times as your business develops. At this point you may consider external support would help in giving objectivity to your deliberations. Don't make the clichéd mistake of not considering support from a suitably experienced consultant. Contrary to some narrow minded opinions a good consultant can add to your thinking in terms of developing business stategy. I know this from personal experience where my 'self confidence' made me want to 'go it alone' more than once. We all benefit from independent support from time to time. The knack is knowing when you need it. Back to the topic. So how do you plan for growth? A good SWOT analysis is invaluable. This is where you benchmark your business against others in your sector and assess, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. As you do this you will see areas of your operations which may need your attention and changing while you will also identify opportunities which will need action. So from your SWOT you can develop your action plan. Even if you are a one man business this is a process which should be part of the ongoing development of your business. You must make reviewing the performance of your business a regular activity. It is all too easy to become comfortable when things are going well. Meanwhile the market and the competition are changing and you could be losing out. Develop a mind set to not accept that things cannot be improved. Avoid Business As Usual. Even in the very best run businesses there is always something which can be done to improve performance. Revisit your business plan; review your business strategy and work out how to capitalise on your current position. Assess risk. Are you exposed to single customer? See Bulletin 011 for more on this. Do other businesses operating in your market perform better than yours? Could you improve your profitability through changed operating procedures and organisation? As your business develops you will need to consider your training needs, personal and those of your staff. Your main objective is to work on the business not in it. This means progressively developing your growth strategy so that as the business owner you are concerned with the future of the business. Too many owner managers work in the business not on it. Working on the business is a sure way of giving perspective on growth opportunities while developing your business strategy. Tip To change and improve are two different things.
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