Growing Business Value

Business Growth Planning Articles

Business growth will take a lot of pre-planning to be fruitful. We all know that. These articles will prepare you and your company for the growth that will happen.
November 29, 2018

4 Steps to Help Make Your Business Planning Process Successful

By nature, entrepreneurs are passionate, driven, and courageous, ready and willing to charge hell with a water pistol. Yet, many business owners are poor planners. Author and businessman John L. Beckley said it best: “Most people don’t plan to fail. They fail to plan.” Oftentimes, you’re so consumed with daily business operations that you don’t take time to plan for the future. Inevitably, you experience setbacks and failures that keep you in a hamster wheel of day-to-day worries. But there’s hope. By instituting these 4 stages of the business planning process within your company, you can disrupt your present weaknesses enough to make them tomorrow’s strengths.
December 3, 2018

The Strategic Planning Process: Steps to Clarity and Direction

As a business owner, you’ll do several different types of planning throughout the life of your business. Although all planning methods are important, one type of planning stands apart from the rest. When you’re trying to solve day-to-day issues and increase the intrinsic value of your company, strategic planning is vital to accomplishing your goals. Therefore, I’m going to walk you through how to develop a strategic plan to implement when you’re looking for solutions to problems… and to grow the value of your business.
December 5, 2018

Understanding The Difference Between Business Vision and Mission

In our Value Growth Series, I’ve identified 8 fundamental areas of your business that can drive up its intrinsic value. I’ve told you that strategic planning is the type of planning you need to do to positively affect the value of your business. In this article, I’ll begin reviewing the pieces of the strategic planning framework. Specifically, I’m going to talk about the difference between business vision and mission, and how they affect your business’s long-term outlook.
December 10, 2018

How Your Personal Values Affect Strategic Planning Decisions in Your Business

Your values are important in guiding your actions along life’s journey. Likewise, your personal values affect your business life as well, driving your decisions and your performance as a small business owner. We’ll discuss these values so ideally you can align your business’s vision and mission with them and hire people who align with you.
December 13, 2018

Using the SWOT Analysis to Increase the Value of Your Small Business

As a business owner, you’ve probably heard of a SWOT Analysis – a process where you identify your business’ Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. However, performing this analysis is nothing more than a time-consuming exercise unless you can put its results to good use. You need to spend time working on those shortfalls to improve your business. Many business owners have used the SWOT assessment to improve their businesses and with the right understanding, so can you. In this article, I will discuss how to use the SWOT analysis within your strategic planning.
December 17, 2018

7 Steps to Setting Achievable Long-term Objectives in Business

As a business owner, you can’t make plans for the future and simply “hope” to achieve them. Taking action is the only way to improve your business and having clear and measurable objectives is the only way to take effective action. Therefore, during your strategic planning sessions, as you’re mapping out how to increase the value of your business, you must set long-term objectives in your business that can actually be achieved. However, many people struggle to set objectives that will drive them toward their long-term vision.
December 24, 2018

3 Questions to Ask When Developing Strategies to Meet Business Goals

Jeff Bezos, once said, “What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tailwind is now a headwind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.” I fully agree… complaining is NOT a strategy. Strategies are plans of action. It’s time to stop complaining about your business and start working on your business by developing strategies to meet your objectives and grow your business.
December 28, 2018

Tactics and Actions…How to Implement Your Strategic Plans

Of the 8 foundational components that drive up your business’s value, 6 are functioning divisions within your company. Here’s what I mean by that. Leaders make plans; leaders and planning aren’t business departments. You, as business owners, give plans to your sales, marketing, HR, operational, accounting, and legal departments to follow. Thus, the team members in those 6 departments implement your plans. Without action and implementation by those functioning divisions, plans cannot become realities. So once you’ve developed strategies to meet your business growth objectives, it’s time for your team members to help you come up with the short-term tactics and actions necessary to accomplish your long-term objectives.