Do you really want to grow your business, but you don’t have a clear idea of where to begin? You’re not alone! Many entrepreneurs and business owners are or have been in the same situation at one point or another in their careers. Things could be a tad easier if all you needed to grow your company is to take on more projects and serve more customers. Unfortunately, sustainable growth requires more than that. It calls for strategic planning and thoughtful execution. If you want to grow your company by attracting quality leads and converting them more effectively, then you must create an effective growth strategy. Here, we will discuss 5 crucial steps to creating this growth strategy that delivers impressive results.
Growth Strategy Step 1: Set Your Long-Term Goals
Business growth is like planning a vacation. Knowing where you’re going makes this planning easier. By predicting the net worth of your business in the next 5 years, you can then develop a strategy that will help get you there. In simple terms, it is more valuable to begin at the end and then work your way backward. You should do the same with your growth strategy. To get started, set long-term ambitious yet attainable goals. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when setting long-term goals, for example, your goals for the next 5 years:
- Where should you and your company be in the next 5 years?
- What level of growth do you expect your business to have realized by that time?
- What is the average annual revenue that your company should be generating?
- How many employees do you see your company having?
By working backward, it will be easier for you to come up with reasonable goals and objectives of where your business should be in the next four years, three years, two years, and one year to achieve this 5-year goal.
Growth Strategy Step 2: Identify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
With your long-term goals already set, the next step is to define your Key Performance Indicators or (KPIs). Match each goal with the most important metrics and results, which will enable you to assess whether you’re heading towards achieving your established goals. One of the most important metrics you should determine is the North Star metric, which is basically the number that best denotes the value customers get from your product or service(s).
With your business, you can go with the customer lifetime value as your North Star metric. Once you have determined your North Star metric, gauge where you are currently as far as this metric is concerned and deliberate on how much the metric should improve to realize the growth you’re envisioning.
Growth Strategy Step 3: Carry Out Growth Experiments
Developing useful experiments to carry out your company’s growth can be difficult. Waterfalling is the most common mistake that companies make when introducing new product features or promotional ideas. Waterfalling happens when a team continues adding new requirements to a project at hand to the extent that the time needed to execute it continues increasing. Consequently, a project that should have taken just a few months to implement ends up taking several months.
The best way to avoid waterfalling is to split your large project into smaller tests that you can effortlessly accomplish within one to two weeks. What’s more, smaller tests will give you helpful insights quickly so you can determine whether a large-scale project makes sense monetarily.
growth strategy Step 4: Authenticate Your Growth Experiments
Now that you have carried out your growth experiments, the next step is to find out whether or not to scale will lead to the growth you’re planning for. With these tests, you’ll identify the most effective growth strategies for your business.
The bottom line here is to make mistakes faster, learn from them, and try a different approach right away. Remember the cost of failing at the experimentation stage is much less than when you’re working on the actual project.
growth strategy Step 5: Promote Accountability in the Workplace
For the successful implementation of your growth strategy, you must cultivate and promote a high-level of accountability in your workplace. Every employee must have a clear understanding of what their role entails and how that role contributes towards the achievement of a company’s long-term goals. A great way to foster accountability in your workplace is to host meetings regularly where each employee running a specific project shares with other colleagues what they launched, the results they got, and the steps they will take to render better results going forward.
A Growth Strategy Extra Tip: On top of fostering a high-level of accountability in your workplace, you should consider recruitment outsourcing in order to reduce cost and improve candidate quality. More importantly, you will have additional time to work on the growth of your company.
Growth Strategy Conclusion
Your business isn’t going to achieve constant, sustainable growth overnight. It will take years of careful planning, thoughtful execution, and running different tests to identify your most effective strategies. If you follow these 5 steps, you can begin to create an effective growth strategy.
Rina Richell
