Building Your Company’s Foundations Goal by Goal

Every successful company has to start somewhere and that’s typically with an idea. But how do you take an idea and run with it? The answer lies in hard work, strong foundations, and lots and lots of goals.

Want to know how to grow your business? It can be tricky but with the right know-how, a little bit of guidance, and a strong strategy you can see huge growth.

Setting Business Goals

Whether you’re just starting out or if you have already been in the game for a few years, setting business goals is vital for the success of your company. There are a few things you need to look at here, most importantly are long term goals.

Many small or medium sized businesses make the mistake of planning small, creating goals for the next few months or maybe a year or two down the line. You need to think bigger. What do you want to achieve in 5 years, 10, 15? Create big goals and then make sure that everything your business is doing is geared towards them.

Types of Goals

Don’t fall into the trap of just thinking about making money – that is a goal and it is very important, but you also need to look at things such as:

• Physically growing your company by expanding your reach, taking on more employees and moving to a larger building.
• Providing a better service or products than your competitors, causing customers to respond well to your brand on a personal level.
• Giving back to the community through charity work, financial donations or volunteer work is a great way to improve your company’s social status.
• Making a profit – yes this is important, but focus on other aspects first and this should come as part of a naturally growing business.

Try to set a goal for your company within each of the areas listed above to allow for even, planned and expected growth across the board. Make sure that you put the same amount of drive behind each of your goals, giving both short and long term expectations from them.

Get Input from Staff

Who knows your business better than those who live it? Nobody, and that’s why you need to strongly consider employee input when creating goals. This will help to deliver realistic, enthusiastic and directional goals that will be achievable through combined efforts by employees and management.

Having everyone working on the same page can go a long way to improve the performance of your company in the long run. No matter how well you think you know your company, getting feedback from people who work on every level will give you an even greater understanding of what’s possible.

Read more: Good to Great: What Jim Collins Can Teach Us About Business

Have a Plan

You already have a business plan, but do you have a growth plan? If not then you need to sit down and put one together. This needs to take in the vision of your company, where you see the business down the line, what are the mission, vision and values of your organization, and what you want to achieve. Your plan should look at several things, such as:

• Forecasting where your current growth, profits and abilities will take you if things continue as they currently stand.
• From the above point you then want to look at where you’ll be if the changes you want to implement are put in place.
• How scalable your growth is through further investment, looking at which areas of your business would offer the greatest return on investment.
• Are there any events or seasonal periods where you can make enough profit to put yourself ahead for the year or achieve targets faster?
• Ways to keep your overheads down to a minimum while being able to reinvest a significant proportion of the profits back into the company.
• Extra markets that you could tap into with your product or services, how much investment this would require and what the additional revenue would be worth to you.
• How your business will change branding or marketing as it grows – you need to keep your customers in mind and as you grow it is likely these personas will change.

Once you have this plan in place you need to make sure that you stick to it. This can be difficult at times, but tailoring your overall business goals to match your plan is important.

Prepare for Growth

With everything else in place, it will only be a matter of time and hard work before your business starts to grow. Make sure that you’re prepared for this and have finances set aside for the extra costs that this entails. It is also important to ensure that your current premises are large enough to take on additional members of staff, if not then you will probably need to consider relocating.

Relocating carries many benefits, including putting you in a prime position for your industry, giving you more room to expand and it can also act as an invaluable PR move. If you deal with products then relocating can also be done to make logistics easier and more cost effective, there really is a lot to think about when growing!

Is your business in the process of strong growth? Give us a call today to discuss your financial options to take you to the next level or to expand into your new premises.