Two roads diverged in a yellow wood (How to plan for growth in 2012)

Posted on | January 25, 2012

(my apologies to Mr Frost)

When you’re trying to grow a business, it’s not really two paths that diverge is it? It’s more like ten. Or twenty. Or…what day is it today? It could be a hundred.

(By the way, this doesn’t have anything to do with the sheer number of hats – I hadn’t realised I’d be an accountant AND a therapist this year – you have to wear when you own a growing business.)

No. I’m talking about opportunities.

I remember when I first started my company. I was pretty new to business in general (ok, very new) and I saw opportunities everywhere. I ran around chasing most leads, qualifying very few of them, and generally wasting my time. I dabbled. I had a vague notion of growing a business – I knew I wanted more clients and more money – but if I look back in honesty, I was running around with no real sense of plan.

Does this sound familiar? How many businesses do you think dabble? I don’t mean you don’t know what you’re doing. You probably do. But if you really want serious business growth, do you really think dabbling is the way forward? Do you really think that an unstructured approach is going to work? It may work sometimes. You can always get lucky and, if you’re a decent chat, you can probably get a number of people on your side. Lord knows I did. But real significant sustainable growth didn’t happen for me until I got a plan.

I’m lucky in a way. My company specialises in marketing strategy. We spend every waking minute of the day thinking about where to place our clients so that they can achieve significant growth. We understand the need for building a comprehensive structure around business development and we are locked into the notion of focus. I practically get in tattooed on new employees.

When it came to creating a structure and strategy for my business, I had all the tools I needed at my disposal. I had over six years of experience in building these strategies for other people, and in seeing how they needed to evolve and change over time as circumstances (internal and external) changed.

Every week I revisit my strategy to ensure that I’m doing the things I need to do to achieve the goals I have set out. And every year I take a look at where we need to get to over the next 12, 24 and 36 months and I readjust the strategy to suit.

What do I look at every year?

1. Business Focus
   This is critical. It’s too easy to get sucked into the idea that any business is good business. It’s simply not true. Anybody can start a business and anyone can lose money. Anyone can just scrape by. The reality of growing a profitable and long-term business is different. You need focus and, more importantly, you need to be focussing on the right things. Over the last three years I have been slowly refining our business model into the one that I want. I’ve also been narrowing our focus. We turn away a lot of business now if it doesn’t fall within our key focus areas. Focussing on the right business models and the right target markets are the most important thing you can do every year. You have to have the courage to do it, but it’s worth the pain.
2. Strategic Partners, Champions & Referrers
   Surrounding yourself and your business with the right people is one of the key parts of having a successful business. Having the right team is absolutely essential. Your team is more than your staff, it’s also about who you have surrounded around your business who can stand beside, behind and, sometimes, in front of you. Every year I look to create relationships with key influencers who I want associated with my business. Every year I look to solidify relationships I have already developed. The stronger these relationships become, the stronger my business becomes.
3. Networking Opportunities.
   You can’t throw a stick at the moment (at least in Edinburgh) without hitting another opportunity to do ‘networking’. I’m of several minds when it comes to networking. I used to do a lot of it, and now I do a very very small amount. I don’t actually believe that 90% of the networking most people do is effective. Certainly my old networking wasn’t. This, by the way, had nothing to do with the quality of the networking groups or the calibre of people I was meeting. I met a lot of great people. But networking has to be twinned with focus. I have to ask “why am I going here?” and “what am I trying to achieve?”. That isn’t about winning more work, but is about my business focus. You should be looking to network and build relationships with a direct link to your business focus. Your focus should drive your networking, not the other way around. Once you realise that, you can start to understand where you need to be and what relationships you should be trying to build.
4. Marketing & Profile
   Again this is a pretty obvious one for me, but every year I look at what I want to achieve with our own profile and marketing initiatives. One doesn’t drive the other. There is no point in thinking up clever marketing if it’s not driving the right business. For me, I start with the type of business I want to build that year and work backwards. I think about what activities can help me achieve those goals and where we may need some help.
5. Cost of Growth
   Finally, I look at what growth I’m trying to achieve in the next twelve months and what that may mean from a financial and capacity point of view. Case and point: we’ve just hired someone. That means wages, taxes, desk, computer, travel…the list goes on. I look at the growth I’m trying to achieve that year and I put different plans in place for what that will mean to the company in real financial, personnel and overhead terms.

There it is. A simple formula to look growth on an annual basis. Simple to say – much more difficult to do. But then, that’s why people hire us ;-)

-j

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