When you’re running a business, and especially when you’re starting one, growth is one of the biggest things on your mind. Even if you don’t want to become a world-conquering giant like Amazon, you still need to keep growth on your mind as a way to maintain your ideal level of customers and turnover as some are inevitably lost over time, or to avoid being too dependent on a small number of products or clients.

If you’re looking at growth, it’s important to have a plan. Unstructured growth can, counter-intuitively, be as dangerous for a company as no growth at all. The risks are manifold, from financial to reputational. A good growth plan assesses your risks and understands your capacities as well as the market to guide you towards growth that builds a strong business in the long term.

Identifying Risks

It’s important for your growth plan to identify the risks that growth may present to your business, but specifically and in general. For example, bad growth decisions can harm any brand, but understanding what your brand is allows you to identify the specific kinds of bad decisions that can impact your relationship with your customers. For example, if you’re valued by them as a prestige brand, commanding a high price for your high quality of product, expertise and after-care, then trying to grow your customer base by retooling as a cheap mass market proposition could do immense harm and leave you with no customers whatsoever.

Understanding Your Capacity

As part of your growth planning, you need to understand your capacity for production. It’s counterproductive to push for a big growth in customers when capacity to serve the customers you already have is at breaking point – a marketing push for more orders if you don’t have the capacity to ship them is an extremely short term gain indeed. Your growth plan for activity needs to march in lockstep with the growth of your capacity to work or you’ll run your business into the ground in short order.

Getting Help

A good growth plan is a valuable resource for your business so it could well be worth investing some resources in professional help constructing one. The consulting industry is expanding, offering more and more options for smaller businesses, not just the giants. If you’re looking for consulting boutiques London hosts many and there are options to get tailored support for your industry and level of development. It’s definitely worth your consideration.