When it comes to growing your construction company, you have two choices: keep on doing what you’re doing and hope that you can expand, or craft a plan for growing your business through strategic objectives. The first option leaves a lot to luck. The second, while more work, is a much more reliable method of growing your company. With a growth plan guiding you, you’ll find it much easier to bring in new clients, expand your company, and improve your profits.
If you’ve never written a growth plan, you may not be sure where to start. The following blueprint will give you ideas for drafting this plan and point out some of the essential factors you need to include.
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Why Is a Growth Plan Needed?
If your company has been steadily growing since you started it, you might wonder if you even need a growth plan. After all, things have been going okay so far. The type of growth you’ve been experiencing may be sporadic, and it’s unguided growth. You’re growing in whichever way the market is pulling you rather than determining how and when your business will expand. It’s like building a project without having any blueprints. You don’t know where things are headed, so you have little to no control over anything.
With a growth plan, you can set a budget for growth, plan to move into specific markets or attract certain audiences, and carefully chart out how you will expand your team. It’s a much more stable way of growing your business that always keeps you in the driver’s seat.
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What Makes Up a Successful Growth Plan?
Now that you know why you need a growth plan, it’s time to take a look at what goes into this plan. You know that growing your business is how you’ll increase your profits, but there are different ways to grow. You can expand into a new market, grow your current market’s customer base, or roll out new services. You need to do research and determine which option for growth is reasonable and fits your current needs. For example, you may not have the resources to move into a new market if it means hiring a new crew and buying new equipment to service that market.
Once you have determined which type of growth is right, you need to break down this goal into multiple objectives that you can achieve. One of these objectives is likely going to revolve around marketing, while another may focus on how you need to expand your company to handle the increased amount of work you’ll bring in. Each of these main objectives can be broken down into smaller goals, too.
A good amount of work you’ll do at this stage revolves around collecting data. You’ll need to do market research to determine exactly what kind of expansion the economy can handle right now. If most of your business is in the commercial industry and most companies are not currently expanding, you may want to look at expanding into a new customer base rather than trying to grow your current base.
Finally, once you have created your growth plan, you need to have ways of measuring and monitoring its success. This will allow you to make changes if it becomes apparent that your plan is not working. There’s no sense in following through with a growth plan that you’ve realized is not going to succeed. You need to have some flexibility in your strategies so you can make corrections if things do not go as planned.
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What Are Your Goals?
When you’re determining your growth goals, you need to be more specific than just saying you want to expand your business or make more money. Without specific, measurable goals, you have no way of knowing if you’ve succeeded or not. Do you want to expand your business by improving your current share of the market by a certain percentage? Do you want to see your annual profits increase by a set dollar amount? Without goals that you can easily measure, there’s no way to tell if your growth plan was genuinely successful or not.
Having specific goals will also make it easier to plan out how you’ll reach those goals. You can break each goal down into specific objectives, then break these objectives down into tasks. Doing this creates a list of things to do to reach that goal, making it much easier to create your growth plan and succeed.
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It’s Time to Grow – Are You Ready?
If you know your business has reached a point where you can grow it successfully, you have to be ready to take advantage of that opportunity. Don’t leave your company’s growth up to chance. By doing a little research and outlining what you want to achieve, you’ll be able to create a growth plan that allows you to reach those goals and continue growing far into the future.
