What is Strategic Business Growth?
The definition of strategic growth is a longer-term plan for how your business is going to grow. There is no set template for this growth: it depends on the business, its vision, and the opportunity for growth.
Where to Start a Strategic Growth Plan?
The only place to start is knowing the current state of the business and having a clear vision of where the business should end up. This gives a strategic intent: what outcome do you want to achieve?
In theory, this sounds straight-forward. However, in reality, it means being able to rise above the operational and the tactical activities, to identify the overarching outcome for the business as a whole, trying to identify the high priority change and articulate its value and worth. This isn’t a skill set that everybody has, so it is worth considering adding capability to achieve it, and identifying where external capability can be applied. One of the key mistakes that are made is not looking for external perspectives on your outcomes. This may mean you limit or overextend the business or worse.
The cost of not having that clear vision for the change is that your people won’t “get it”, and therefore won’t buy into that change, or that they misunderstand and so begins the gap between the intention and the delivery. The benefit to having that clear vision, though, is that it can be clearly articulated to staff, stakeholders and customers. All 3 groups will be able to understand why the change will be beneficial, and will be able to use that understanding of the why to ensure their day-to-day decisions support that reason and direction (without heavy interference in that decision making).
What is the Intended Outcome of a Strategic Growth Plan?
Does your business need to continue doing what it does but bigger, bad-er, faster and stronger? or is there another opportunity for your business, to look at diversification?
These two different questions are my starting point and are ultimately, aimed at understanding the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of that strategic growth. This, in turn will affect the ‘how’ of implementing the growth strategy, and as outcomes, will lead to two very different implementations.
How to use a Strategic Growth Plan?
It is not a silver bullet by any means, but it is a single place to have the plans for the future growth of the business making it easy to confirm if a new piece of work is aligning to the future, or just carrying on what was done in the past.
It needs to be referred to constantly to ensure that the daily operational and the tactical activities are aligning the business to the new strategy, otherwise there is little use in having one and little chance of changing / growing the business.
How can Business Growth and Innovation help?
We can help create or review a strategic growth plan for your business. We have two offerings; the first is we can create a Product Strategy (market and competitor analysis, risks, growth opportunities) or we can do ongoing Virtual Product Management with your where you get the Product Strategy and someone to help keep the focus on implementation for the growth of your business.
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