Achieve Your Vision: Put A Business Growth Strategy Plan In Place

It’s no secret that every entrepreneur wants to grow their business. Entrepreneurs are famously ambitious and driven. But creating a business growth plan is difficult. There are many business growth strategies out there, and it can be hard to know which one is best for your business.

At Strategic Coach, we help entrepreneurs think about their thinking. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses by expanding their minds and changing the way they think about their role within their business.

We don’t focus on nitty-gritty marketing strategies or “growth hacks,” because at the end of the day, most entrepreneurs already understand how to grow their business. What they need is to expand their thinking.

That’s why we emphasize the importance of creating a vision for your life and your business. It’s the best way to grow as an entrepreneur while also growing your business, and it’s far easier than trying to implement some convoluted business growth strategy plan.

You already have a vision in your head! You just need to get it out—and we can help.

Vision: the best business growth strategy plan.

Creating a vision is not nearly as complicated as it may seem. It all comes down to shifting your mindset and getting clear on what you’re ultimately looking for in your life and business. Dan Sullivan boils it down to one simple sentence: “Always make your future bigger than your past.”

Forget fancy marketing tricks and new technologies; this simple mindset is the best business growth strategy. It’s particularly important to recognize and focus on the “bigger than your past” segment. To give yourself direction on what you want to do going forward, you need to utilize the most important learning and growth experiences from your past.

Ask yourself, “What has been my biggest area of learning over the past 90 days?”

Think of that specific learning and keep it in mind throughout the creation of your vision and the growth of your business. Looking back on your biggest learning moments will always help to provide direction on the best way to move forward and grow your business.

The best business growth strategy plan is the one that keeps you moving forward. If you can just focus on making your future bigger than your past, you’ll continue to gain momentum and grow your business.

But as valuable as this mindset is, it’s not quite enough. Let’s talk about how to get a little more strategic with your vision, and why that’s so important for business growth.

Creating your bigger future.

As an entrepreneur, you have a unique opportunity to set yourself apart. You can provide a valuable service that no one else can offer or a product that excels above anything else on the market.

You can help people in many different ways, but if you really want to set yourself apart from the rest, you’ll need to get strategic about your vision. If you can get strategic and specific about this, you can actually create an entire business growth plan on paper. The key is to focus on long-term, mid-term, and short-term growth.

Start by thinking about what you would like your life to be like in 25 years. This can go far beyond business growth. What things make you the happiest in life? What is most important to you? What do you ultimately want out of your business and life? Write these things down.

Next, ask yourself, “What needs to happen in the next ten years to get there?” There’s no need to create a specific list of action items here. This can still be fairly generic and broad.

Once you’ve written that down, think about what needs to happen in the next five years to get there. Things should be getting more tangible here. These are the action items that will help you craft your actual business growth strategy.

And we’re going to continue to get more short-term … Now, think about what needs to happen in the next year to get there. It’s important to think about momentum here. These things don’t need to be done in the next year; they just need to be in motion. What needs to be started within the next year to get you on track with your business growth strategy?

Finally, it’s time to think in the extreme short-term. What needs to happen in the next three months to maintain your confidence, focus, and clarity? What needs to happen so that you can continue to move forward and allow yourself to work toward the important things you’ve already outlined?

And then, to take it one step further, what needs to happen in the next week to get there? These will not necessarily be directly related to your business growth strategy, and they certainly will not correlate directly to your 25-year goals. We recommend focusing on the five most crucial results for the next week.

If you’ve written all this down … guess what! You’ve just created your business growth plan.

But this is not a one-and-done kind of thing. True business growth requires constant reexamination. The goals and steps for growth you’ve outlined here will change over time as your business grows and changes.

Napoleon Hill said, “Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought.”

It’s important to continue to come back to this document as you grow your business (and as you grow as an entrepreneur). Not only will things change, but the more you review this document, the more ingrained it will become in your mind.

The lifetime growth formula.

We’ve found that nearly all entrepreneurs enter into a consistent cycle as they grow their businesses. Once you understand how this cycle works, you can use it in conjunction with your business growth plan to achieve steady growth throughout your life.

We call it The 4 C’s Formula. The 4 C’s — commitment, courage, capability, and confidence — are the key elements for growth as an entrepreneur.

It starts with commitment, when you commit to a future that’s bigger and better than your past. Most entrepreneurs have already done this just by virtue of starting and growing their own business.

But committing to growing your business enters you into areas of fear and uncertainty. This leads to courage. As you grow your business, you’re guaranteed to find yourself in new and uncomfortable situations. As a business owner, it’s up to you to figure out a way to get through these.

Which leads us to the next C, capability. As you encounter these areas of fear and uncertainty, you’ll develop new capabilities. We think of these as knowledge, attitudes, skills, and habits. Those new capabilities will then propel you to the final C by giving you increased confidence.

And there is actually a fifth C that you’ll encounter … After committing, gaining courage, developing your capabilities, and increasing your confidence, you’ll have increased clarity about where you’re at in your business and how to grow.

This simple system is the best business growth strategy for any entrepreneur. Approaching your growth with this specific and strategic mindset will help you grow ten times faster than if you were to simply keep going as usual.

It helps to understand this cycle because as you enter into areas of fear and uncertainty, you’ll know that pushing through will give you courage, which will then turn into new capabilities, confidence, and clarity. It’s a key component to any business growth plan because it will continue to reappear as you commit to growing your business in different ways.

Getting started with your vision.

We understand that creating your vision can be difficult to do on your own, which is why it’s one of the first things we focus on when entrepreneurs join our community.

Many entrepreneurs don’t feel like they have time to devote to creating their vision. When you’re so focused on growing your business and keeping your team on track, the idea of stepping back to think about what you want may seem ridiculous.

But it’s important to remember why you became an entrepreneur in the first place. Yes, you need to grow your business—but you also need to focus on growing it into the business you desire. Unlike most people, you have the freedom to create your ideal lifestyle. Your growth as an entrepreneur should be fun! You should enjoy growing your business.

That all starts with a vision.

If you’d like to talk with someone about your entrepreneurial vision, you can always schedule a free Discovery Call with one of our Membership Advisors. On that call, they’ll get you started on your vision by helping you determine your dangers, opportunities, and strengths, and then use that to figure out what’s possible in the next three years for your business.