How do you create a growth plan for your business? A growth plan is really like any other strategic plan, but then we chunk it down into actions. The way that I start this is I look at my big, hairy, audacious goal, or maybe, hey, where do I want to be in 10-15 or 20 years? What do I want my business to look like? Once I know that, then I can work backwards. We then know what my turnover is, what my gross profit is, and what my net profit is, I know where I am now and where I need to get to. Then we look at, ideally, the number of years in between, and we can chunk it backwards.
So, if we know that in 10 years, we need to increase our turnover by $2 million. We’re looking at $200,000 a year, then we look at it and go, okay, in the next 12 months, I need to get 200,000 more revenue in my business. What can I do to enable my business to get that goal? What do I need to implement, and then break it down even further. You can look at quarterly plans, and 90-day plans, and what do we need to do in the next 90 days to help me achieve my goal of an extra $200,000 in sales. Then we look at it and we go, okay, I only want no more than five things that I can break this down. This is because research shows if you have more than five things to do, they either don’t get done properly, or they don’t get done at all.
The five things that you need to do to get your goal may not be reliant on you. They may be outsourced to other staff or contractors, it may be employing someone else to come in and assist. What we then do is we make sure that these people are well aware of that their goal is to do this for the next 90 days to achieve something. You need to have regular check-in meetings with them, make sure that they’re on track, and make sure that they’ve got the tools to get what they need. So, then we go ahead 90 days and we can go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. We’ve got those five goals down, what are the next five that we need to do to get our $200,000 turnover, and we break them down.
We have a 90-day plan of five actions, which we break down again, either outsource to yourself or a contractor to do it and rinse and repeat. So, we go through our business in chunks of 90-day plans, with goals that we can tick off some accountability around it and maybe even some kind of reward if you actually do tick them off. Ultimately a growth plan is looking where you want to be breaking it down into what you need are the next three years the next one year, the next 90 days and then just rolling repeat.