Introduction

Having a successful business isn’t just about getting more leads and selling more products. Those are important to ensure your business survives, but they won’t necessarily help you achieve all your business goals. To truly grow your business, you need to create a plan and stick to it.

If you’re ready to grow your business, vague, haphazard ideas won’t get you very close to your goals. You need to strategize for growth in a systematic way. By following a growth strategy, you’ll know exactly where your business is headed and how to get there.

Making the decision to expand your business is exciting. It means you’re already delivering the products and services people want and making your customers happy. But it’s also a challenging period as you face risks around expansion. Coming up with an actionable plan will help you mitigate the uncertainties.

Before you grab the pen and paper and start writing your business plan, you need to thoroughly assess your current situation. This will put you in the best position to decide what modifications and innovations will have the greatest impact on your business growth.

In this course, you’ll methodically review all aspects of your current business and identify what you have going for you and what might be working against you. Once this assessment is complete, you will be ready to take your insights and follow the step-by-step guide to plot your Business Growth Plan which will lay the stepping stones for your future.

Learning Objectives:

By the time you complete this course, you’ll be able to:

• Take a fresh look at why you are in business and what your aims are for your business growth, so that you can reconnect with what motivates you
• Reaffirm your ideal target market and specify your ideal customer profile, so that you know exactly who to market to
• Get a snapshot of the financial situation of your business, so that you understand the resources available to you
• Define what you do well as a business, so that you recognize what already works for you
• Assess the places in your business where you aren’t performing strongly, so that you can take steps to lessen or eliminate those weaknesses
• Identify your business opportunities to see where growth can come from, so that you tap into any hidden potential
• Flag the external conditions that could hinder your business growth, so that you are aware of what you need to do to mitigate them
• Take a look at your current marketing and its effectiveness, so that you know what to focus your efforts on
• Review how your current team members are working individually and together, so that you can identify changes to make for greater productivity  
• Examine your current business processes and tools to assess if they’re delivering what you need, and to make sure you have the most up-to-date systems
• Put together a comprehensive Business Growth Plan for the next 12 months that will guide and support your success goals
• Review your Business Growth Plan and identify your next steps, so that you can achieve the goals you set for this course

This course is broken down into 12 modules to take you step-by-step through a comprehensive review of your business and the creation of a Business Growth Plan.

The modules follow a logical order, so while you can skip around if you want, it’s best to work through them one at a time.

As you go through each module, use your Action Guide to help you complete the Action Steps at the end of each.

Expectations

Before we start the course, take a minute to think about what you want to get out of it.

In the Action Guide, write down three skills you expect to gain.

Now that you’re clear about what you want this course to deliver, we can get started.