5 Steps To Build Your Annual Growth Strategy

Having a growth strategy makes it easier for small business owners to streamline operations and execute their vision of achieving continuous growth. Without a growth strategy framework, your small business could be at the mercy of market fluctuations and an inconsistent consumer base.

When planning and executing an annual growth strategy, you should analyze different parameters specific to a financial year. These parameters could include previous years’ achievements and budget estimates, and a vision statement for the year ahead. While the entire process may get a little overwhelming at times, guidance is all you need to sail through. 

In this article, we explain five simple steps to help build your annual growth strategy. But before we dive into the specifics, let’s first understand what a growth strategy is all about.

As defined by Gartner, a growth strategy is a plan companies design to overcome current and future business challenges and realize their expansion goals. An annual growth strategy defines strategic guidelines and goals for the 12 months in a financial year. Annual strategies are more measurable in terms of tracking performance and results. 

Acquiring assets, enhancing market reach, increasing market share and revenue, and improving products or services are a few examples of business growth strategies. 

Your business needs goals to keep moving forward, stay motivated, and ensure continuous growth. Therefore, set up realistic—and not inflated—goals to supercharge your strategic planning for the next 12 months. 

The process of defining goals requires you to brainstorm and identify relevant business objectives based on the industry you cater to. To ensure your goals are clear, adopt the SMART approach—i.e., make each goal Specific, Measurable, Attainable, and Timely.

Successful goal setting gives you the direction to develop a strategic plan of action and helps identify how to make a move in that direction. For instance, if your goal is to generate more leads, then your plan of action should be trying things such as social media marketing, rich-media advertising, and content marketing. 

To build your action plan right, you should have the following:

• Action items/tasks that you need to take care of and complete

• Deadlines for each action item within the action plan

• Defined responsibilities for the teams or individuals responsible for the different tasks within the action plan

• Resources for completing the tasks and attaining your growth goals

In this stage, you need to experiment and identify tools and resources that will work best to build your growth strategy. For instance, you can use project management and project planning software to track and manage the various action items you’ve defined. 

Besides proper management, these software tools also help identify the pros and cons of taking up a project based on insights such as defined outcomes, deadlines, and scope of work.

Now that you have an action plan ready, along with the supporting tools, the next step is measuring impact. You can do this by running a trial-and-error method, which includes testing, identifying problems, fixing the problems, fine-tuning them to align with business values and objectives, and obtaining performance reports and insights for optimization.

The 5 Ps of measuring performance are:

• Precise: Clarity on goals without leaving anything open to interpretation

• Perceptible: Measurable steps and tactics that are easily understood

• Pertinent: Every tactic/goal should help the business grow

• Practical: Alignment of the growth team with the mission statement, vision, and values

• Punctual: Setting a time frame for every goal to ensure timely execution

In the final step, you need to build a team and allocate tasks to team members based on their skills and knowledge. Ensure your team members understand the work they are doing and add value to it. 

According to Gartner’s 2020 Execution Gap Survey, roughly 40% of executive leaders say that their enterprise accountability and leadership are not aligned on strategy execution. That is because most businesses lack a coherent plan to align team members with business goals and objectives. So, plan for team alignment to accomplish the goals of your growth strategy.

You can use various software tools to build and align your annual growth strategy with the goals of your small business. Software solutions help create and share business goals, mission, and values; track performance; and manage charts to create hiring plans. 

One such tool is strategic planning software, which allows you to effectively plan your strategy by centralizing goals and enabling communication among teams. It offers transparency across the planning process. Additionally, its capacity and financial planning capabilities let you set up plans, define roadmaps, and measure progress.