As much as we’d like for it to be, no business ever uses the same strategy they originally developed throughout the entirety of their existence. Eventually, you’ll need to fully explore and develop new ideas. That’s where business growth strategies come into play.

Setting up one of these is what will help your small business reach its full potential. With a tiny bit of luck and a whole lot of work, you can use this new plan to help your company flourish. But how do you go about creating such a strategy? Well, that’s what we’re here to answer for you today with this list of steps to efficiently develop your business growth strategy.

Consider What Has Been Working

Before you truly begin, you must start by determining which of your previous strategies have been the most successful for your company. It’s best to start by considering your target markets. Figure out which ones make up the largest chunk of your customer base, as well as which ones you don’t see as often. Do the same thing with your product line. Establish your best sellers and the ones that people tend to forget about. Set up similar charts for each aspect of your business.

Once you have all the numbers, you must put some meaning to them. You need to have a good idea of what does and doesn’t work for your company. Without that info, you’ll have to base all of the following steps on complete guesses, which will cause your probability of success to go way down.

Expand or Redefine Your Business

Now that you’ve defined the stats of your business, it’s time to make some decisions on where to go next. For some of you, your company might be headed in the exact direction that you desire. If that’s the case, there won’t be much that you’ll need to change, which means it’s time for you to try expanding. The easiest way to do this is to lean into what’s already working. Do everything you can to push your popular products towards the groups that have been continuously coming back.

However, you can also use this opportunity to take a chance. For example, if you’ve been making sales to a demographic that you weren’t even targeting, there’s a good chance that they’re an untapped market. If you find a way to sell to them successfully, you could potentially have found a jackpot that will help your business boom.

Not everyone can be that lucky, though, and sometimes instead of expanding, it will be better for your company to redefine itself. After going over your previously gained info, you might find out that none of your efforts have amounted to much. There’s still a chance that you could find a niche demographic in your current pool, but sometimes it’s better to take a step back and redefine the values you want your company to fulfill. This will be a tedious process to work through, but if done correctly, you will be able to get your business back on track more effectively.

Figure Out Your Finances

Working out any money problems your company might be having is typically the next best step to take. If you’re not making a high enough revenue margin, it might be time to reconsider your financial plan. The best way to do this is by cutting unnecessary costs, but that’s not always a possibility.

If things are looking bleak, it might be time to find some financial help. Applying for loans and searching for investors are both solid options, but what we’re going to recommend instead is our 401k business financing option, known as DreamSpark. With this alternative to traditional lending, you can use your own money to finance your business. That way, when it’s all said and done, the only person you’ll truly owe is yourself.

Set Up Goals and Objectives

Now that all the nitty-gritty planning is out of the way, it’s time to get into the steps to efficiently develop your business growth strategy that’ll focus on your future. This gets done by creating a list of goals and objectives for your company to follow in the coming years. As long as you’ve done all of the work leading up to this point, these will basically write themselves. As long as you ensure that they utilize the knowledge you’ve gained to guide your company to a more profitable future, everything should work out just fine.

Implement the Strategy

Of course, these goals and objectives mean nothing if you don’t properly communicate them with your team. You can’t just expect everyone to be on the same page as you because they didn’t do all of the research that you did. So, once you’ve clearly planned out your entire business growth strategy, you’ll need to set some time aside to fully explain it to them. Doing so will help your new plan execute itself without a hitch.

Analyze and Revise Where Needed

Now that you’ve developed and implemented your strategy, one would assume that would be the end of the process. Unfortunately, it’s not. In fact, a true business growth strategy never ends. You have to continue to track the data you found in the first step to see if all is going to plan. If not, you need to make adjustments to shift your company’s focus and realign with your goals.

This will involve a lot of fine-tuning as you go because it’s nearly impossible to get it perfect on your first try. Plus, if things get too far off course, you might need to go back to the drawing board and start again. For example, if you took a chance on a new target market that didn’t pan out, you will have to find a new one and rework your entire strategy from there.

Hire Help If Necessary

This tends to be a lot for just one person to handle, so don’t be afraid to hire help if needed. You can either reach out to a third-party company that specializes in this field or hire some experienced employees who have worked on business growth strategies in the past.

Regardless of the choice you make, there’s nothing wrong with admitting that you can’t do this on your own. No one is expecting you to be able to. It’s rare for one person to be able to do it all, so getting others to assist you in this kind of endeavor is entirely understandable.