A plan to where?

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If you carry on as you are, where do you get to?

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If you take your current revenue growth, and project this same growth forward, is this where you want to revenue to be, in +1, +3 or +5 years?

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More importantly, where do you want to go and why?

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What is your plan for the business.

 

What does it look like? 

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Do all the founders or directors agree?

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Where you want the business to go, is an important question. Allow time to reflect on the question. 

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Planning on 'the how'

If for example, you want to get to £5m turnover in 3 years, these are some of the questions on how / what it would take to get there.

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Revenue

What does the plan mean for revenue this year and next year. For this month's turnover. And what does this mean your month on month turnover growth needs to be. How will you achieve higher revenue growth? Will the revenue growth come from existing customers growing, or what's the level of new customers you'll need to find.

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Your role as the CEO/founder

Start with you and your role. Would expanding the business mean more work for you, more than your time and capacity allows. This could be a factor currently holding your business back.

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Recruiting to support your role

Have you reached a growth point where you need to recruit, to support your role? Recruiting at a higher level can be expensive heads. Not recruiting can hold back the business, as you time capacity becomes a bottleneck. 

 

Is there a compromise, such as promoting within, recruit part-time, accept the dip in profits for the longer goal (and your own sanity).

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Barriers to growth

To grow, where are the bottle necks? For example, growing will have an impact on production or team to deliver your products or services, the wider team, sales capacity, customer support, IT, finance, etc. Removing one bottleneck can move the bottleneck on to the next place in the chain, check all. Identifying these early, starts the problem-solving thought processes, and allows you to delegate to other people who can start on the problem-solving. 

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Change takes time & can create uncertainty

What changes are needed as part of your growth plan? As well as the financial investment, change takes time. Time on top of your and your teams day jobs. Consider how change projects/growth plans will be resourced.

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Team input & ownership

Change impacts your time, in other ways too.  Change it's itself can be unsettling for people, even where the change will have a positive impact for them. When people are involved in determining the growth plan, people tend to be more accepting of the change and committed to delivering it. A feeling of lack of control and the uncertainty this causes, is the biggest cause of change stress and resistance. 

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Your team have their own needs, personalities and opinions. Listening to what matters to them, their motivations, their concerns about the future plans, may identify how the plan delivery can be adapted for them or communicated to reassure them that it is deliverable.

 

For example, a future growth plan that shows the business has had a history of revenue growth, can reassure a team-supportive-style manager, that their team won't be overstretched to deliver a growing budget. 

 

Projections can create calm

For instance, taking your managers who are responsible for revenue. They want to deliver on expectations. If expectations are unclear, this can cause stress or under-achievement of revenue. 

 

Being clear on revenue targets and breaking those targets down into understandable chunks (aka number of new customers/clients), means they have clear goals to focus on.  

 

In this way, projections can bring calmness, focus, and effective delivery of results. And teams who stay with the business (key for any people business). 

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Keep communicating 

Does everyone know where you're going? Check you have the same expectations.

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