How important is it to have a clear vision for your company? What should you focus on?
A business growth strategy is crucial for companies looking to expand their operations. However, the success or failure of such strategies depends on several factors, including the type of business you operate, its size, and the resources at hand.
A business growth strategy is a plan or blueprint for achieving sustainable growth over time.
A growth strategy aims to ensure that the company continues to thrive for a long time.
In this article, Sean Farnell, Partner at Burgis & Bullock, explores the key characteristics of a long-term business growth strategy.
What is a long-term business growth strategy?
A long-term business growth plan includes all aspects of your company’s future. It would help if you thought about how your company will grow yearly and what strategies you should use.
The key to successful long-term business growth is to focus on the right things at the right times.
Long-term growth strategies are often divided into three categories:
1) Market and marketing strategy
The market strategy refers to the overall direction of your business. For example, if your company sells products in the healthcare industry, you would likely want to focus on developing new products and services that address various needs within this sector.
While the marketing strategy, includes everything about marketing your product or service. You may decide to invest more money in advertising, or you could choose to rely on word of mouth.
2) Finance strategy
Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality. This is a mantra we live by at Burgis & Bullock. No matter how successful a business is, it will disappear if there isn’t cash in the bank.
What are the cash requirements of your business? Businesses should have a plan in place for raising finance and capital. Be that through a loan, a venture capitalist or other means.
Ultimately, a business will fail if it has a lack of funds. We regularly advise our clients on how to gain access to the necessary finance to enable sustained growth for a business.
We’d urge anyone concerned about having the financial backing for their business to contact us, or their accountant, as there are a wide range of options available.
3) People strategy
Ask yourself, what skills do you need within the organisation to ensure that it can grow at the rate and pace that you envisage it doing. The skill needs of a business will change over time – the skill you need as a start-up will be vastly different to an established business.
Five or 10 years down the line, the need for management skills will become equally, if not more, important that entrepreneurial skills – which are essential when starting out.
Having a strategy in place for the people you need within the business is certainly beneficial.
Why is a long-term business growth strategy important?
A long-term business growth plan is essential for any company. Without a clear vision and goals, you may struggle to grow your business.
In addition, if you don’t have a good idea about what you want to accomplish, you’ll never be able to achieve it.
So, before starting anything else, you need first to define your long-term business growth strategy.
Here are a few important factors of long-term business growth strategy:
- It helps you avoid being stuck in one place.
- You can grow your business without having to worry about financial difficulties.
- You can focus on growing your business instead of worrying about how many resources you have.
- Your company can use its profits from one year to fund its operations in the next year.
- You can invest in your company’s future instead of just focusing on today.
How to create a long-term business growth strategy?
A long-term business growth plan should include three main components:
1) Identifying your target market.
Once you’ve identified your target market, you need to understand what they want and how you can provide them with what they’re looking for.
2) Understanding your customers’ needs.
Don’t underestimate your customers, and importantly never take them for granted. The needs of your customers will change over time and don’t be surprised if this is the case.
Keep in regular contact and dialogue with your customers to ensure your service is matching their developing needs.
3) Developing a unique product or service that meets those needs.
Finally, you need to develop a unique offering that provides real value to your customer base.
It would help if you always kept in mind that every company has a lifespan. You can’t expect to continue growing forever. And your company’s future depends on your ability to make intelligent decisions at the right time.
There are limits to every business. It might seem strange to be thinking about an exit strategy when launching you business, but this should always be something you consider.
When the time comes that you can’t take the business any further, how will you move away from the business?
Long-term business growth planning also requires careful consideration of the following:
- Market dynamics
- Company performance
- Financial health
- Competitors’ actions
- Technology trends
- Legal issues
- Human resource management
- Marketing strategy
- Customer service
- Operations
- Product development
- Quality control
- Corporate culture
- Branding
- Sales and marketing
The key characteristics of a business growth strategy that will yield long term results
A long-term growth strategy is a plan that helps businesses reach their full potential. To develop a successful growth strategy, you need to identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. This way, you can focus on improving areas where you are lacking.
Growth strategies are essential because they allow companies to expand into new markets or increase sales. They also help companies become more efficient and effective.
The key characteristics of a long-term business growth strategy are:
- Focus on the right thing at the right time
- Align with your company’s vision and mission statement
- Be consistent over time
- Take advantage of opportunities as they arise
- Create a strong foundation
- Have realistic expectations
- Don’t get distracted by short-term gains
- Keep it simple
The business growth strategy needs to be a working document. The majority of sectors and industries are rapidly changing – this can be affected by available resources, technology or other market factors.
How to achieve long term business growth?
The key to achieving long term business growth is to focus on building a solid foundation for your company.
It means having a clear vision, mission statement, and values. Once you have these things down, you need to build a solid team around you.
Build a solid team around you and remain focused on the ultimate goal. There will be challenges along the way, but plan for these challenges and how you will overcome them.
Finally, you must be able to execute well. If you don’t do any of these three things correctly, you won’t achieve long term business growth.
Having a long-term goal and working on a day-to-day basis to reach that goal can be incredibly powerful.
We recommend to many clients that when they are planning long-term is that their plan leads all the way up to retirement.
Have a big long-term goal and assess what the goal means to me and the people important to me.
Break that long-term goal down into short-term milestones. Expand that short term goal into a five-year plan, but then break that into milestones again.
Always start with the end in mind and envisage what your business and life will look like when you it is done.
Don’t be too upset if things don’t go to plan; analyse, regroup and try again. It might be that a one-off event such as a pandemic impacts your business, or the technology needs of the business change completely, or the market is telling you that what you thought your customer wanted wasn’t what they wanted at all.
How we can help at Burgis & Bullock
It is crucial to set up a long-term growth strategy for your business – and Burgis & Bullock are there to support and advise with your plans.
We do a great deal of work on business growth strategies through our mastermind groups and also on how to measure the impact of those strategies.
The Burgis & Bullock Business Mastermind Group will be making a return soon and you can head to https://www.bb-bmg.uk/ for more information.
We’re also rolling out strategic planning sessions to clients in 2022 & if they’re interested please contact me for more details on sean.farnell@burgisbullock.com