Three Plans That Every Growing Business Owner Needs

How do you work on what your business needs for growth?

To create a growing business that thrives beyond its early stages, most businesses need to generate three key plans. What are those three plans and how do they help you build a high growth business?

When you look at the most successful businesses, you discover that each of these plans plays a unique role during different stages of the business’s growth. Over the next several months, we share why you should consider having these plans completed and what it can do to add value to your business. I work with you to create solid plans that not only produce better results today, but allow you to create long term growth for your business.

We are launching a new blog called High Growth Business Report at http://www.highgrowthbusiness.com, designed to take on the unique challenges your high growth business faces with sales between $5 million and $100 million per year. I’m very excited about launch this new blog on Thursday.  I hope it helps you build the business and life of your dreams.

I use a simple process to explain the lifecycle of a business. It is Build, Transform, and Sell. I’m certain that almost all small and mid-market businesses go through these stages.  There are many businesses that grow their annual revenue to seven figures without ever changing the way they do business.  However, to create a business with sales in excess of five million dollars, you need to change the way you do business, to provide you both the personal and financial freedom you expected when you started your business.

Many small businesses are small because their leaders are small, not because their markets are small. There are many successful entrepreneurs running small businesses, but most entrepreneurs are frustrated with their business’s growth and profits over the longer time frames.  An individual can build a million dollar business based on their own unique gifts and strengths in a market. If you hope to build a lasting multi-million dollar business, the business has to expand beyond just its owner’s skills.  Your ability to attract the right stakeholders to your business is critical to long-term success. A business cannot grow beyond the vision of the original founder without attracting great employees, customers, and partners to help them leverage what they know about their markets.  Now, all of this has been the build-up to the first plan that every start-up should have and that is the business plan.

A business plan provides a roadmap for you to define your business. It can provide your partners and financial investors with a better understanding of what the business opportunity is and how you see growing the business. Many entrepreneurs start out without a business plan because they feel it’s too much work. Most of those businesses fail. Most statistics show that 80% of businesses fail in the first five years.  Not all of them fail, though, because many entrepreneurs are incredibly gifted sales professionals.  This carries them through the initial phase of the business. They sell successfully to people that they have dealt with in the past, many times with good success. Because of their own strengths in selling combined with a high growth economy, their business takes off. At least until they run out of their initial contacts or they begin to run out of capital.

While I’m not suggesting that you can’t build a business without a business plan, I am suggesting that you have limited upside during this phase of your business. If you have a great idea and good selling skills, you can be successful selling many people your product or service. The problem comes when you have to deliver it. An additional problem crops up when you decide to start selling to larger clients. They want to know that if they buy your service, you’ll still be around to deliver it in the foreseeable future. Many of your larger clients want assurances beyond your spellbinding personality. If your service impacts a critical aspect of their business, they want to know more than just the short time results.  They want to know you’re in the business for the longer term. During the recent recession, several major manufacturers were stalled when their primary suppliers went out of business. This caused costly delays and missed deadlines for their customers.

I’ve also seen high growth businesses having such thin margins that they ran out of money before their first receivables came in.  One of the advantages of having a business plan is that you’re better able to forecast sales and profits. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I don’t know how to create a business plan and I don’t have time to create one since I’m busy building my company.  Tomorrow, I begin sharing with you the key elements of a business plan.  I also share how to start putting together a plan for your business and still have time to run the business. You can find our first special report at http://www.highgrowthbusiness.com on Thursday morning.