Five Steps To Develop A Crystal-Clear Business Growth Strategy
A well thought out business growth strategy is essential if you’re planning to grow your trades business in the near future. Simple right?
Surely all you need to do to grow your business is to do more of what you’re already doing.
As well as:
- Employing more staff
- Engaging more customers
- Securing new projects
- Watching as your business grows and expands.
All of this sounds relatively straight forwards doesn’t it?
Complexity Explained
The reality of business growth is very different. It’s way more complex than you’d initially imagine, and there are lots of challenges involved in growing a business.
With issues like
- Cash flow management
- Hiring the right employees
- Finding the right technology systems
- And knowing when to cap your growth
You’ll find that growing your trades business is trickier than simply ‘doing more’.
This is why you need a bulletproof business strategy; a concrete plan that will act as your roadmap for growth.
The Elements Of A Good Business Strategy
- Outline your goals
- Examine how you’re going to reach them
- Take a close look at the challenges you’ll meet along the way.
To prepare for business growth, you will need to consider all these points before putting together a clear strategy for business growth.
Step One: Define And Examine Your Goals
By defining clear goals for your business, you are laying the foundations upon which to build your strategy.
After all, how will you build your strategy without having something to aim for?
Distinguish between your short and long term goals to help give your business direction.
Typical Goal Examples
Some examples of business goals to get you started include:
- Grow profits by 20%
- Increase service offerings
- Expand your office/workshop space
- Take on five new skilled tradesmen
- Grow organic website traffic and leads by 50%
- Reach a certain number of repeat clients
- Expand your service areas
- Launch a new product or service
- Increase customer reviews online
- Increase customer communications
- Better organise your team in the field
After you have defined the goals you are working towards, you can turn your attention to how you are going to achieve them.
Step Two: Prioritise
Ok, now you have your goals. The next step is to think about prioritising them.
Some goals may be more important than others. Such as:
- Growing your profits might have more precedence over growing your website traffic.
Whilst others may follow on naturally from others. For example:
- By employing five new tradesmen, your business turnover will increase; allowing you to increase your service offerings or expand your service areas.
Step Three: Investigate Strategies
You now know what you want to achieve and in what order, but how are going to do it?
The next thing to think about is what actions you need to take to be able to achieve your goals.
If you plan to increase your service offerings, your process may look something like this:
- Conduct preliminary market research on what type of services your customers want.
- Review laws and regulations about the new service.
- Secure any licences or accreditations if applicable.
- Hire the appropriate staff to offer the service – or train up existing staffto ensure they’re able to meet the standards expected.
- Roll out a marketing campaign. – If you’ve offered plastering services for ten years and are now offering carpet fitting services too, you’ll need to come up with a way to inform previous customers and potential new ones.
Once you have created a roadmap like this, you will need to repeat the process for each one of your goals.
Step Four: Focus On Your Strengths
What are your strengths in business? Focus on what you are good at and build on this a part of your strategy.
For example, if you are an expert in a particular service, focus on how you can use that to help your business to grow.
Some businesses believe that business growth can be achieved by bringing up their weaknesses in line with their strengths.
This may be true for some, yet when you are only a small business, playing to your strengths will help you to grow quicker.
Focus on what you’re good at first. Then when you start to see some growth, you can start thinking about how you can strengthen any weaknesses.
Step Five: Evaluate The Competition, Assess Market Demand
One of the key challenges that businesses face when they grow is how market demand will affect them.
For some businesses that grow too quickly, they may find that business is good for a few months but then demand for their services dries up. Leading to extra employees who are disgruntled about having no work to do, and your company can quickly become financially overextended without the demand for your services.
You’ll also need to look at what your direct competitors are up to.
- Look at their pricing models – are yours in line?
- How are they approaching their marketing?
- What sort of reviews are they getting?
- How can you differentiate yourself from them, while still targeting the same market?
Additional Tips To Build Your Strategy
- Use data. – Leverage the data collected about your business to help you find trends in how your business works, see where it can be improved and even tap into new markets.
- Invest in talent. – Your employees are the face of your business, especially when you’re running a trades business. So focus on finding the best talent to reflect how people see your business
- Try to define timelines for your goals. – Turn your goals from a wish list into plans by setting a timeframe.
- This will also help you in putting together the strategies you’ll need to meet your targets.