Once the business is stabilised, it’s time to look to the future. By now, we’ll understand why the business has suffered in the past. In this step we’ll look at the wider and long term changes the business needs to ensure a healthy future.
To do this, three things have to happen:
- opportunities need to be researched, quantified and evaluated
- business goals and objectives need to be established
- a robust business plan that management supports and can buy into needs to be developed.
These are my focus for this step. The resulting business plan sets out realistic, longer term business goals and covers:
- three to five year strategic growth objectives
- functional team SMART objectives
- product and technology offerings
- on the ground sales and marketing tactics
- resource needs: people, capex, working capital
- funding requirements
- partnership objectives.
The plan will be a blueprint for sustainable growth in sales, profit and cash in the coming years. It also means we’re equipped for Step 4.
