Blueprint For Growing Your Business

Assuming that you and your team have fully researched your market segments, competitors, potential changes in the economic environment and what your company must be like to achieve future success, it's time to develop a solid blueprint of how your organization intends to reach its goals. Such a blueprint should include identification and selection of alternatives, a clear map of your company's intended path and an execution plan that securely connects the plan to daily operations.

Identifying and selecting initiatives should be a highly interactive process for your entire executive team, and maybe even beyond. The question to be asked is "given all of our research about market segments, competitors, the economy and visions of the future, how can we transform our company into one that will clearly be able to meet our long-term growth objective?" During this process, original and unbounded thought is key. Once all ideas have been set forth, the team should revisit each one and decide which ideas should be implemented as initiatives.

Perhaps the most powerful way to summarize and communicate the company's selected initiatives is to create a "growth map". An effective growth map should arrange the planned initiatives by year as building blocks so that each year's set of initiatives builds upon the previous year's initiatives. The growth map should also reflect the corresponding financial results that will likely be generated each year as the company is transformed. An especially useful addition to the financial results would be to include an estimate of your company's value for each year of the plan so that changes in overall company health can be assessed as the company moves toward its long-term objective. The most relevant and effective value calculations consider not only expected cash flows, but each of the company's risk factors - both controllable and uncontrollable.

Finally, the growth plan should include an execution strategy that depicts the major steps to be performed for each initiative and the employee teams that will be responsible. Quite often, initiatives consist of steps that need to be executed by different teams within the company. Even though the Executive Team may have overall accountability, the growth plan should belong to everyone and each employee team must take ownership and responsibility for their part of the plan.

With a clear strategic plan in place and all teams pulling in the same direction as they complete their portion of the plan, growing your business will become the "new normal"!

Dale Quarto has over 30 years of executive experience. As a former CEO, he grew his company from a small local information provider to one of the largest in its industry. Dale is now CEO of Quarto Growth Systems, LLC, which, in addition to traditional consulting and coaching services, provides downloadable systems and tools for growing a business. Quarto Growth Systems' complete program can be found at http://www.quartogrowthsystems.com/. In particular, the program includes a comprehensive, yet easy-to-use system for building a strategic plan.

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