March 15, 2021

Author: Amber Anderson

"Growth" is a term we hear a lot as business owners, but what does it really mean? The answer is different for everyone, and so is the journey.

At Tote + Pears, my branding and marketing agency, I've been helping businesses of all sizes grow for almost a decade. The businesses that were successful knew how to frame a blueprint for growth.

A blueprint for growth is a framework that you use to scale your business. Take time to go through the following steps to set up your business for success.

1. Set your vision.

What does growth mean for you? The answer is key to making sure you hit your growth goals. Ask yourself the following questions to help inform your research, strategy and execution:

• What are you hoping to get out of growing your business?
• What are the most pressing issues right now?
• Where do you see your business in the next three, five, 10 years?

For some business owners, growth could mean getting your products in more places or creating a franchise. For others, growth might mean increasing revenue by 3 percent by 2025. For others it could mean bringing on outside investors so you have the capital to scale.

Having a vision will help ensure that everything you do is helping you get there.Next, set goals you can track. A good starting point is to use SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. For example, if improving customer loyalty is one of your goals, then your SMART goals might look something like:

• Improve our customer retention rate by 5 percent by the end of the quarter OR
• Increase customer satisfaction scores by 20 percent by the end of the year

2. Determine your place in the market.

A great place to start is by exploring your market. Let's take the branding and marketing industry as an example. It's a saturated market, and sticking out can be a challenge. So when I decided to grow my agency, I spent a few years evaluating the market to identify gaps.

I realized there was a gap when it came to developing and marketing products and services to women. And not just women, but women from diverse backgrounds. Once I knew this, it became easy to tell our story to our clients and partners, layout a plan for how we could use our expertise to help our clients and start our own product line.

There are a number of cost-effective ways to evaluate your market, including exploring free data from research studies, interviews, online polls and reports in your industry. Public policy organizations, foundations and universities are all great resources you can tap into as well.

3. Create a strategic plan.

Once you identify trends in the market, the next step is to determine how you can fill them. Strategic planning is incredibly important when you’re building a blueprint for growth. The strategic plan connects your vision to your execution by providing guidance on what you’ll work on.

The purpose of planning is to make sure you’re thinking through the areas of your business that need to change to enable growth.

Sales, marketing, production, operations and support are some of the common business areas that impact growth. For each area, ask yourself what’s needed to move to the next level. What are the processes, people and tools that would need to be in place to support you as you scale?

If during this process you identify a gap, write it down. That could be hiring new employees, finding new tools to help automate existing processes or kicking off a business process analysis project to identify areas where you can improve efficiency.

At the end of this process, you’ll have a list of gaps that need to be filled. Work with your leadership team to determine a plan for filling them. Plot out the changes for each department, add a budget and a timeline that aligns with your vision and available resources, and document it. This is your strategic plan.

4. Execute on your plan.

After you've defined your vision and created the plan, it’s time to execute.Hold an all-hands meeting with your staff and walk them through the new vision and your plans for getting there. Then set up separate projects that you can manage and track. If you’re on a multi-year growth plan, schedule an annual meeting to review the plan with your leadership team, and reconnect quarterly to make sure you’re tracking toward your goals.And if you run into trouble, consider hiring a consultant or business coach who can help you put the processes in place that are needed to move things forward.Scaling isn’t easy—it takes work. But with a vision, an understanding of your market, a strategic plan and your team, it is possible to make your dreams a reality.Read more articles on strategy.

Photo: Getty Images