Business mentor: Key issues for planning business growth

Q. I am not sure if my business is in a state where it can sustain the growth that I wish to achieve. How do I check that I am ready to grow further?

Julian Kroll, Business Development Adviser with Industry New Zealand, replies:

A. If I understand your question correctly you are really asking about a business health check and trying to assess that the critical areas of your business are sound for growth.

There are a couple of good reference books to get you started. First, Planning for Success, written by Industry NZ in 2001, which covers business plan writing. Let's assume that you have this under control.

The second is a publication released last year called Foundations for Growth: A New Zealand Guide to Business Improvement. I recommend you use this as a starting point.

I will try to summarise it through the following list of the key issues.

Leadership and strategy

Without a key understanding of where you are going and why you are going there your growth could be misdirected. Leadership does not mean that you work the longest and hardest, but it does mean that your staff understand the context of their role in the business and how they can contribute to it.

Relationships

Understand the key relationships in your value chain. This means measure customer satisfaction pre and post sale. Understand the behaviour of your frontline staff and how they represent your business and finally don't forget about suppliers and partners and the role they play in the delivery of products or services from your business.

Know your market

This means know your competitors, know your customers and learn what the future may look like. Where do you seek input? Do your customers form part of the value proposition in your business and do you use them to held mould the future directions that you might take?

Processes

Don't forget to revisit these as you grow. They are the business processes that support your operations and the processes that support your customers. An example might be the customer complaints process. Can you audit this and see who is responsible for complaint resolution and how this ties into potential business improvements?

Development

There are several dimensions to this area. These are staff development, how do you train and obtain high performance from your team to sustain growth, and secondly what proportion of your focus will be required to look at research and development.

Review and analysis

How does information analysis drive business improvement in your company and how does it change your priorities? These can uncover key triggers to assist with growth. It may also be healthy to look at benchmarking your business against others, even if it just focuses on financial ratios in the beginning to see if you are effectively using resources.

Public responsibility

Remember you have two roles to manage here. How is your business perceived in the market and how are staff perceived. Do they operate ethically and with high integrity?

If the list above raises more questions than answers then perhaps you might seek some support with the next steps.
m
* Julian Kroll, Business Development Adviser at Industry NZ can be emailed at: julian.kroll@industrynz.govt.nz or phone: (09) 9199003