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7 Growth Plan Templates to Build a Growth Strategy

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

October 20, 2023

Ever feel like you’re steering your ship without a compass? You want to grow your business, but the “how” aspect might be unclear. If you feeling lost at sea, a growth plan template could be the guiding star you’re looking for. ⭐ 

A growth plan template is a bit like a business-minded GPS, leading you through the winding roads of market trends, financial forecasts, and strategic planning . A good one will be your go-to guide for turning your big ideas and plans into a concrete roadmap to success. With a plan in place, you’ll reach your growth goals with ease. 

In this guide, we’ll show you what makes a rock-solid growth plan template and how easily it works for business owners and entrepreneurs. We’ll also set you up with growth plan templates so your organization functions more fluidly and effectively. Let’s dive in! 

What are the key components of a growth plan template?

1. clickup growth experiments whiteboard template, 2. clickup 30-60-90 day plan template, 3. clickup ansoff matrix whiteboard template, 4. clickup product development roadmap whiteboard template, 5. clickup development schedule template, 6. clickup process audit and improvement template, 7. clickup employee development plan template.

What Is a Growth Plan Template?

A growth plan template is a preformatted document that guides businesses in outlining objectives, strategies, and actions aimed at business growth. Think of it like a strategic plan or framework for focusing on different growth elements, such as market expansion, product development, and financial projections. And it applies just as much to startups as it does to established businesses. 🙌

It serves as a roadmap, giving cohesion and clarity to your growth initiatives. Whether scaling or diversifying, a growth plan template offers a structured way to find opportunities and roadblocks. And since it provides dedicated areas for keeping track of metrics and KPIs, measuring progress and adjusting strategies is user-friendly.

Growth plan templates provide a framework for outlining a business’s growth objectives and strategies for achieving them. Here are some critical components of a growth strategy template:

• Executive summary : An overview of the growth strategy and its goals 
• Business overview : Details of your organization and its current operations
• Market analysis : Research on your target market (and the current market) will inform your growth strategy. Know your customer base, know your strategy
• Growth objectives : Clear, measurable goals tied to a timeline. This could be new customers, revenue growth, a social media strategy, or improving customer retention
• Strategies and tactics : The actions you’ll take to achieve your growth objectives
• Financial projections : Estimates of projected revenue and profit if growth objectives are achieved
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) : Metrics and other measurable data demonstrate the success of your growth strategy
• Resource allocation : A list of resources needed to reach your objectives, like a new marketing strategy, business model, or financial plan
• Risks and mitigation strategies : Assessing risks that could derail your plans and contingencies for avoiding those circumstances
• Implementation timeline : A schedule for when milestones will be reached and objectives completed
• Review and adjustment process : A system for reviewing and adjusting as necessary

7 Growth Plan Templates

If you haven’t turned to various strategic planning templates in your continuous effort to increase revenue, measure success, and identify new growth opportunities, then the time is now.

These pre-built assets are designed to help teams create and execute a unique business plan regardless of your industry or how many employees you’re working with. Bypass the hassle of spreadsheets and emails with a template that makes running experiments a breeze. 🌬

ClickUp makes it easy to find a business growth plan template customized to your needs. Get clarity on metrics and other KPIs vital to mapping out your organization and where you’d like it to be. A thoughtful and strategic business growth plan may be the missing piece you’re looking for. Here are seven growth plan templates to check out!

ClickUp’s Growth Experiments Whiteboard Template is a valuable resource for bringing your team together during brainstorming and growth planning sessions. With the ability to plan and act on your ideas from the same collaborative space, this template has every feature you need to follow through on an effective business growth plan.

You can customize every inch of this business growth plan template template—from the structure itself to the objects that bring it to life. Add sticky notes, Docs, media, or even live websites to your growth plan for additional context regarding your business operations. Then act on your ideas in an instant with the ability to convert any object on your board directly into an actionable task.

Plus, ClickUp Whiteboards are highly visual, meaning you can maintain a high-level view of the entire growth plan from the initial idea through implementation. 

Each department’s growth plan should align with the strategic objective of the overall company. Suppose you’re aiming to revamp a marketing plan or reach a new target market. In this case, you may need to bring on team members with different skill sets or focus on team expansion. 

ClickUp’s 30-60-90 Day Plan Template provides an actionable framework for onboarding new employees. Quickly set goals, create milestones, and identify the steps needed to integrate smoothly into a new organization. 

Custom features show you how progress is tracked at a glance, like a separate view for onboarding, which helps organize and keep track of all onboarding tasks. Or use Chat view to collaborate with stakeholders and discuss progress deftly. And with References view, store all necessary references for your plans. 

When your organization aims for more growth and diversification, a 30-60-90 plan ensures a coordinated and transparent process where everyone is on the same page. At the same time, you’re enhancing how your team operates. Having the right tool in your corner is indispensable. 

Understanding the risks and rewards associated with different business growth strategies is invaluable for sound decision-making. After all, what good is a growth strategy aimed at market penetration if it could potentially compromise your business?

Use ClickUp’s Ansoff Matrix Whiteboard Template to visualize available strategic options in a way that’s simple to understand and enhances collaboration with your team. This template makes it straightforward and intuitive to identify opportunities and risks, understand which strategies are the most appropriate for your business, and compare different plans against each other to find the best fit. 💡

And it easily adapts to your organization’s level. Launching a new product or planning explosive growth in new markets? Use this template for both.

Features like tagging, nested subtasks, multiple assignees, and priority labels make project management precise and extraordinarily efficient. Being able to brainstorm, organize ideas, and create content with team members ensures everyone is working in harmony. Status labels like Open and Complete add to the frictionless workflow.

If your organization is focusing on innovation, developing new products, or entering new markets, you’ll want to align those goals with your overall growth strategy. And all of that requires teamwork, planning, and clear direction. 

When you need a growth plan template that’s easily customizable, ClickUp’s Product Development Roadmap Whiteboard Template is a no-brainer. This template is designed for you to visualize, document, and track product development progress.

Features like custom fields let you manage tasks and visualize a path to product development that’s way more straightforward than a spreadsheet. Identify potential problems long before they become a fire you need to put out. Cross-team dependencies are easy to see, and engaging with stakeholders is seamless.

So whether you’re experimenting with pricing changes, improving existing products, or something in between, the key is having a comprehensive tool that keeps everyone in sync. And the right template can act as a centralized platform to empower team members in executing growth strategies effectively. 

Unlike a product development roadmap, which offers a high-level view of a growth strategy and its direction, a development schedule digs deep into the nitty-gritty. See it as a more granular and tactical guide for you and your team. 

Recognizing the need for meticulous planning, ClickUp’s Development Schedule Template ensures each step in your organization’s process is completed accurately and precisely. Stay on track, meet deadlines, adjust your schedule as needed, and allocate your resources and budget appropriately.

Update statuses for tasks with labels such as Done, In Progress, Needs Input, Stuck, and To Do to keep your team members informed and your projects on track. And use custom attributes like Stage, Attachment, Estimated Duration Days, Remarks, and Actual Duration Days to visualize progress at a glance.

A well-designed development schedule is much more than a sophisticated to-do list of tasks. It’s a dynamic and adaptable framework that helps you align strategic planning with tangible execution. 

Most organizations probably have a few processes they would like to improve or streamline in their company. And since those processes influence the scalability of a business, initiatives for expansion into new markets, and product development, it pays to keep tabs on their effectiveness. 

Use ClickUp’s Process Audit and Improvement Template to keep those tabs. The template allows you to execute quick process reviews or dive deep into how every aspect of your system functions. 🛠

Custom statuses like Not Started, In Progress, Complete, and To Do make keeping track of progress a breeze. Open two different views in different ClickUp configurations, such as the Overview and Getting Started Guide, so you and your team will have no problem jumping right into optimizing the processes that need it.

Categorize and arrange tasks to suit your needs—like audit planning, data analysis, and implementation—so you’ll clearly see the path from A to B. And combining this template with goal-tracking apps , teams and individuals will see progress on an even more detailed scale.

By conducting routine audits, you’ll optimize your processes for efficiency and productivity . Improve customer service and satisfaction by leaps and bounds. You’ll be able to create your own roadmap for taking corrective action where you need to and increase the quality of your decision-making. 

Employee development is an essential piece of any growth strategy. Your team members are one of your most valuable assets, and as your organization grows, your employees should grow with it. 

An employee development plan shows you which departments or areas need new talent and which ones may need it in the future. These plans play a role in maintaining an engaged and motivated workforce, too. Even better, you’ll improve employee retention rates and create an environment that encourages your current team members to develop into future leaders in your organization. 🌻

With ClickUp’s Employee Development Plan Template , you’ll ensure your team is always aligned on the most critical objectives. 

Start by assessing where your team members stand with their current knowledge and skill levels. Next, establish clear short and long-term goals that are personalized for each team member. Once you’re clear on the resources you need to meet those objectives, use the information you’ve gathered to create an action plan tailored to each member of your team.

The Development Status List view will assist in keeping track of how each employee’s development plan is progressing. Organize your team’s tasks into different statuses, including Done, For Review, and In Progress, so you always know where you are in your growth strategy. Having essential information all in one place also keeps stakeholders well-informed and in the loop.

The same strategy works for departments within your organization, as well. By creating individual and comprehensive development plan templates and tracking progress and performance with measurable goals, you’ll know that you’re building a successful and productive team. 

Choose the Best Growth Plan Template for Your Team

Whether you’re honing in on market share, tweaking your marketing strategy to include SEO, or brainstorming your next big move with vision board templates , a growth plan template can take your organization to new heights. 🦅

It’s not just a tool for executives and leadership in an organization. Team members benefit from a clear roadmap that aligns their day-to-day tasks with the overarching company objectives. The flexibility to customize your template means it’s adaptable, whether you’re a small business dreaming big or an established company looking for incremental improvement. 

If you’re looking for an all-in-one tool that lets you seamlessly move from product development and ideation to process audits to mapping out company growth potential and more, sign up for ClickUp — it’s Free Forever.

Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.

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Writing a Business Growth Plan

Table of Contents

When you run a business, it’s easy to get caught in the moment and focus only on the day in front of you. However, to be truly successful, you must look ahead and plan for growth. Many business owners create a business growth plan to map out the next one or two years and pinpoint how and when revenues will increase. 

We’ll explain more about business growth plans and share strategies for writing a business growth plan that can set you on a path to success. 

What is a business growth plan?

A business growth plan outlines where a company sees itself in the next one to two years. Business owners and leaders apply a growth mindset to create plans for expansion and increased revenues.

Business growth plans should be formatted quarterly. At the end of each quarter, the company can review the business goals it achieved and missed during that period. At this point, management can revise the business growth plan to reflect the current market standing.

What to include in a business growth plan

A business growth plan focuses specifically on expansion and how you’ll achieve it. Creating a useful plan takes time, but keeping your growth efforts on track can pay off substantially.

You should include the following elements in your growth plan:

• A description of expansion opportunities
• Financial goals broken down by quarter and year
• A marketing plan that details how you’ll achieve growth
• A financial plan to determine what capital is accessible during growth
• A breakdown of your company’s staffing needs and responsibilities

Your growth plan should also include an assessment of your operating systems and computer networks to determine if they can accommodate profitable growth .

How to write a business growth plan

To successfully write a business growth plan, you must do some forward-thinking and research. Here are some key steps to follow when writing your business growth plan.

1. Think ahead.

The future is always unpredictable. However, if you study your target market, your competition and your company’s past growth, you can plan for future expansion. The Small Business Administration (SBA) features a comprehensive guide to writing a business plan for growth.

2. Study other growth plans.

Before you start writing, review models from successful companies.

3. Discover opportunities for growth.

With some homework, you can determine if your expansion opportunities lie in creating new products , adding more services, targeting a new market, opening new business locations or going global, to name a few examples. Once you’ve identified your best options for growth, include them in your plan.

4. Evaluate your team.

Your plan should include an assessment of your employees and a look at staffing requirements to meet your growth objectives. By assessing your own skills and those of your employees, you can determine how much growth can be accomplished with your present team. You’ll also know when to ramp up the hiring process and what skill sets to look for in those new hires.

5. Find the capital.

Include detailed information on how you will fund expansion. Business.gov offers a guide on how to prepare funding requests and how to connect with SBA lenders.

6. Get the word out.

Growing your business requires a targeted marketing effort. Be sure to outline how you will effectively market your business to encourage growth and how your marketing efforts will evolve as you grow.

7. Ask for help.

Advice from other business owners who have enjoyed successful growth can be the ultimate tool in writing your growth plan.

8. Start writing.

Business plan software has streamlined the process of writing growth plans by providing templates you can fill in with information specific to your company and industry. Most software programs are geared toward general business plans; however, you can easily modify them to create a plan that focuses on growth. 

If you don’t have business plan software, don’t worry. You can create a business growth plan using Microsoft Word, Google Docs or a similar tool. For each growth opportunity, create the following sections: 

• What is the opportunity? Is your growth opportunity a new geographic expansion, a new product or a new customer segment? How do you know there’s an opportunity? Include your market research to demonstrate the idea’s viability.
• What factors make this opportunity valuable at this time? For example, your growth opportunity could utilize new technology, take advantage of a strategic partnership or capitalize on a consumer trend.
• What are the risk factors for this opportunity? Identify factors that may make this growth opportunity challenging to execute. For example, challenges may include the state of the overall economy, intense competition or supply chain distribution issues. What is your plan for dealing with these challenges?
• What is your marketing and sales plan? Identify the marketing efforts and sales processes that can help you seize this growth opportunity. Detail the marketing channel you’ll use ( social media marketing , print marketing), your message and promising sales ideas. For example, you could hire sales reps for a new geographic area or set up distribution deals with relevant brick-and-mortar or online retailers .
• What are the costs involved in this growth area? For example, if you add a new product, you may need to buy new manufacturing equipment and raw materials. While marketing costs are a given, remember to include incremental sales costs like commissions. Outline any economies of scale or places where your existing operations make the new growth area less expensive than a stand-alone initiative.
• How will your income, expenses and cash flow look? Project your income and expenses, and prepare a cash flow statement for the new growth area for the next three to five years. Include a break-even analysis, a sales forecast and all projected expenses to see how much the new initiative will add to the bottom line. Include how the new growth area will positively (or negatively) impact existing sales. For example, if you sell bathing suits and you decide to grow by adding cover-ups and sunglasses, you will likely sell more bathing suits. 

A cash flow statement will indicate if you must secure additional financing, and a break-even analysis will let you know when the growth opportunity will stop being a drain on the company’s financial resources and start turning a profit.

After completing this exercise for each growth opportunity:

• Create a summary that accounts for all growth areas for the period.
• Include summarized financial statements to see the entire picture and its impact on the company. 
• Evaluate the financing you’ll need to implement the plan, and include various options and rates. 

Why are business growth plans important?

These are some of the many reasons why business growth plans are essential:

• Market share and penetration: If your market share remains constant in a world where costs consistently increase, you’ll inevitably start recording losses instead of profits. Business growth plans help you avoid this scenario.
• Recouping early losses: Most companies lose far more than they earn in their early years. To recoup these losses, you’ll need to grow your company to a point where it can make enough revenue to pay off your debts.
• Future risk minimization: Growth plans also matter for established businesses. These companies can always stand to make their sales more efficient and become more liquid. Liquidity can come in handy if you need money to cover unexpected problems.
• Appealing to investors: For most businesses, a business growth plan’s primary purpose is to find investors . Investors want to outline your company’s plans to build sales in the coming months.
• Concrete revenue plans: Growth plans are customizable to each business and don’t have to follow a set template. However, all business growth plans must focus heavily on revenue. The plan should answer a simple question: How does your company plan to make money each quarter?

Motivate your employees by sharing your growth plan. When employees see an opportunity for increased responsibility and compensation, they’re more likely to stay with your business.

What factors impact business growth?

Consider the following crucial factors that can impact business growth:

• Leadership: To achieve your goals, you must know the ins and outs of your business processes and how external forces impact them. Without this knowledge, you can’t direct and train your team to drive your revenue, and you will experience stagnation instead of growth.
• Management: As a small business owner, you’re innately involved in management – obtaining funding, resources, and physical and digital infrastructure. Ineffective management will impact your ability to perform these duties and could hamstring your growth.
• Customer loyalty: Acquiring new customers can be five times as expensive as retaining current ones, and a 5 percent boost in customer retention can increase profits by 25 percent to 95 percent. These statistics demonstrate that customer loyalty is fundamental to business growth.

What are the four major growth strategies?

There are countless growth strategies for businesses, but only four primary types. With these growth strategies, you can determine how to build on your brand.

• Market strategy: A market strategy refers to how you plan to penetrate your target audience . This strategy isn’t intended for entering a new market or creating new products and services to boost your market share; it’s about leveraging your current offerings. For instance, can you adjust your pricing? Should you launch a new marketing campaign?
• Development strategy: This strategy means looking into ways to break your products and services into a new market. If you can’t find the growth you want in the current market, a goal could be to expand to a new market.
• Product strategy: Also known as “product development,” this strategy focuses on what new products and services you can target to your current market. How can you grow your business without entering new markets? What are your customers asking for?
• Diversification strategy: Diversification means expanding both your products and target markets. This strategy is usually best for smaller companies that have the means to be versatile with the products or services they offer and what new markets they attempt to penetrate.

Max Freedman contributed to this article.

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Blog Marketing

Growth Strategy Checklist: Plan Your Business Goals With These 5 Templates

By Nadya Khoja , Jun 16, 2019

I often find that at the end of the year my sense of perspective is heightened and I generally feel a lot more motivated and excited about the future.

Do you feel the same way?

Part of this feeling comes from knowing that a new year is just around the corner, which means a fresh start at tackling any personal or business-related challenges. As a result, it’s the perfect opportunity to start planning your growth goals for the coming year.

But one of the challenges that come with planning our growth strategy is setting realistic and ambitious expectations of what is achievable.

As it turns out, there is a very effective strategy for setting and hitting your growth goals, and by following this strategy you can accurately predict what is possible to accomplish.

I’d like to walk you through the process of not only identifying what those goals are but also how you can break down the actions required to hit them. I’ll also provide you with some useful growth strategy templates that myself and the team at Venngage use to help make the journey a lot easier.

You can also take a look at some other process infographic templates that could help you map out different growth strategies in more detail. Or create a business plan using our online drag and drop tool–no design experience required.

The process for identifying and hitting your business goals can be broken down into five steps:

Step 1: Identifying and setting your high-level goals.

Step 2: Understanding which inputs and outputs impact those goals.

Step 3: Running experiments to impact those inputs.

Step 4: Validating those experiments.

Step 5: Fostering accountability within your team.

By the end of this five-step process, not only should you have a very clear idea of what goals to target for the year, but you will know exactly what is required of you and your team to get there.

Visually documenting the path to hitting your business goals will not only help you have a better understanding of the specific factors that will influence growth, it will also provide the rest of your team with a concise and easy-to-follow growth strategy roadmap as well.

(Oh, and did I mention that we’ve got plenty of roadmap templates to help you visualize your growth strategy?)

Writing out the steps is useful, but showing those steps can help everyone envision the path in question.

Step 1: Start by identifying your high-level business goals

As human beings, we have a tendency to start all journeys at the beginning. And this makes sense of course. After all, if the stories we read started at the end, wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of going through the journey?

Imagine if you were to start reading the Harry Potter series, and J.K. Rowling started the story by saying:

“Hey guys, just so you know, Harry wins and Voldemort is defeated in the end.”

Or if the Star Wars series started with Luke finding out that Darth Vader was his father? Wouldn’t it kind of kill the mood and the anticipation that comes with reading or hearing a story?

Well, the journey to product growth and business growth functions a little bit differently. In fact, it’s almost more helpful to start at the end and work backward, especially when your planning growth .

It makes sense too, right?

If you could know for sure how much revenue your company would make in the long-run before you even started your venture, would that not be helpful in figuring out the best growth strategy to get there?

Starting at the end of your growth strategy:

It’s always helpful to start out with a very high-level and ambitious goal. Many successful and fast-growing companies do this, and all of them have different terms to refer to these high-level goals.

Shopify calls this the BHAG, which stands for big, hairy, audacious goals . This business goal is usually meant to seem a little bit crazy.

Brian Balfour takes a more practical approach and refers to setting high-level goals as using the Top-Down Approach to inform your growth models.

And of course, at Venngage we simply call these our “high-level” or “long-term” goals. But the point is, you need to start out by mapping out a long-term goal, like your 10-year goal.

Where do you see yourself and your company by that time? How much should you grow your business ? How much revenue do you expect your company to generate? How many employees do you see yourself having?

Take a look at the example in this growth strategy template:

These are the High-Level Growth Goals for a hypothetical company called StartUp Masters . Their mission (“ To provide startups with an affordable means of managing projects in order to achieve rapid growth ”) is clearly stated, and their goals are broken down in order to depict where they envision themselves to be In 10 years, 5 years, 3 years and finally 1 year.

At 10 years old, the company expects to be making 100 million in revenue and they expect to achieve this with 120 employees. They’ve also indicated the number of daily active users required to get there.

On top of that, they’ve listed out some steps required in order to achieve those goals. As you glance further down the funnel, you can see that this is, in fact, a pretty audacious business goal considering where the company is probably starting out from.

By working backward, it becomes easier to make somewhat realistic goals of where the company would need to be in 5 years, 3 years and 1 year in order to hit that 10-year goal.

Start breaking down your own high-level goals with the Growth Goals template.

CREATE THIS ROADMAP TEMPLATE

OK great, so you’ve got your high-level goals set out, now you can wipe your hands clean and be done with your growth strategy, right?

This is only one small part of the process. The next step is to figure out how you can hit your 1-year goal, and that means understanding which metrics are most important to improve in order to make a big impact on growth.

Step 2: Know which inputs and outputs impact your goals

Andy Grove’s book High Output Management is one of the most useful resources on building a high-functioning and, of course, high output company.

In this book, he uses the analogy of a breakfast factory to help explain the importance of all the little actions (or inputs) that have an impact on the successful operation and growth of the factory (its output).

What this means is that for every goal you set, there are key metrics and results which will help you identify whether or not you will, in fact, achieve that goal . And of course, there are specific growth strategies that you can follow to help you move the needle on those key metrics.

Identifying your North Star Metric

One of the first metrics you should identify is your North Star Metric . This metric is often described as the one number that best represents the core value that your product delivers to your customers.

For instance, if we take Airbnb as an example, their North Star Metric is the number of nights booked. Why?

Because it’s a clear indication of their product’s value .

If more nights are being booked, and that number is consistently increasing, it means that more customers are having a positive experience with Airbnb and are therefore returning to the platform to book their accommodation.

At Venngage, our North Star Metric is the number of infographics completed. Because if people are completing more and more infographics that they are proud of , it’s a clear indication that they are finding value from the tool.

This number should also have a direct correlation with your company’s revenue goals and retention goals. The more value people are finding from your product, the more likely they are to stay and continue paying for your product.

The next step is identifying what your current baseline is for your North Star Metric. Let’s take a look at the growth strategy template below for our hypothetical company, StartUp Masters .

In the previous template that broke down their high-level goals, they indicated that one of the steps to achieving their 1st-year goal was to increase the retention rate to 30% at 12 months.

If you take a look at the end of the above template, you can see that the baseline of completed projects is indicated under the Retention OKR.

As you can see, they have identified that users have completed 90,000 projects successfully, and they currently have 45,000 Daily Active Users.

Now, in order to hit their revenue and acquisition goals, the company needs to get to 70,000 Daily Active Users. But in order to hit their retention goal of 30%, each of those users needs to complete at least 3 projects successfully which they have calculated as a leading indicator of better retention .

When creating your growth strategy, you need to figure out the overall baselines for your North Star Metric, and how that number will need to change in order to impact your various OKRs .

Setting your OKRs and Inputs

If you weren’t aware of what an OKR is, it stands for Objective Key Results. They refer to specific metrics that you can track which will, in turn, influence your high-level goals.

In most software startups, many founders follow the AARRR framework for setting and tracking OKRs . This stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

Each of these metrics is important for understanding the behaviors of your customers and of course, the growth potential of your business.

Sometimes, however, it can be overwhelming to influence every single one of these metrics, so in this particular growth strategy template, which helps to break down goals, StartUp Masters is focusing on influencing Acquisition, Conversions (Revenue) and Retention OKRs.

Take a look at the Acquisition OKRs they identified while growth planning:

The main metrics that influence acquisition for StartUp Masters is their Organic Traffic goals and their Paid Traffic goals.

They will need to scale their organic traffic by 130,000 unique visits a month, and their paid traffic by 70,000 unique visits a month.

However, if you look at the inputs that impact those specific OKRs, there are multiple pages that drive organic traffic, so they’ve outlined the required traffic to these various sections of their site.

For the sake of simplicity, the OKRs mentioned here only talk about the traffic goals and not on the burn rate of your marketing budget. However, in actual practice, you may also be concerned about your customer acquisition costs .

Typically, paid acquisition channels like Facebook Ads and Adwords have a higher CAC than organic channels like SEO or content marketing. A long term growth plan might hence also include targets to bring your average acquisition costs down.

By continuing to break down their goals into smaller and more specific inputs, it becomes easier to envision the path towards achieving those high-level goals within the growth plan.

When you are setting your own OKRs , you also need to know which metrics you can manipulate at a smaller scale that will have greater leverage . And as you continue to figure out which inputs will impact your OKRs, you can start thinking of experiments that will, in turn, influence your inputs.

Help your team to clearly understand which inputs impact your main OKRs.

CREATE THIS REPORT TEMPLATE

Step 3: Brainstorm experiments to run that directly affect your identified inputs

Coming up with valuable experiments to run is not always as easy as it may seem. In fact, one issue that many startups face when it comes to implementing new product features, or marketing strategies , is waterfalling .

What’s waterfalling , you ask?

Simply stated, waterfalling is what happens when a team continues to add requirements to a project, to the point where the task becomes so large that the time required to implement it keeps increasing. Eventually, what was supposed to be implemented within a two-week sprint, ends up taking months to push out. 

In an effort to avoid falling victim to the waterfall taking over your growth strategy , it’s better to operate on a one or two-week sprint cadence.

This can be achieved by, you guessed it–breaking down these big projects into more bite-sized experiments, or MVTs.

An MVT is a Minimum Viable Test, and its purpose is primarily to derive insights and validate whether or not it’s even worth pursuing the larger-scale project . By running more MVTs, you gain more learnings which can help inform which steps to take next.

Start by deciding which OKR you are trying to impact. As you can see in the growth strategy template below, the OKR that StartUp Masters is trying to impact is their retention metric. The goal is to push more users to complete one additional project in the span of three weeks.

Then, the suggested experiment is to create a pop-up modal within the project dashboard which will push users to begin a new project upon hitting the 80% completion mark.

They’ve even hypothesized the results that this new implementation will reap. If you take a look at the next step, they’ve outlined the effort required by each team. This is usually a pretty clear indicator of whether or not your experiment is veering in the direction of a waterfall.

Your goal when planning out MVTs is to run experiments which require low effort, but have a high output . These are considered to be “slam-dunks” because you can get big results in less time and with less work required.

Naturally, not every experiment will be a “slam-dunk” but as a general rule of thumb, you want to avoid anything that could be considered high effort and low output, which risk becoming “turtles”.

So here’s where the MVT breakdown board comes in handy when planning your growth strategy. Just walk through this process to get an idea of whether or not your suggested experiment can and should be broken down even more.

Using the example above, let’s run through the flowchart.

• Can this experiment be implemented in the span of 1 week?

Well, considering that the Marketing and Engineering effort required is medium, and the Design effort is high, chances are that it will take at least a few weeks to run the test, so the answer is no .

• Has this implementation already been validated and proven to have a direct and positive impact on the OKR via a previous experiment?

Since this is a first test that StartUp Masters is running in order to try and get more people to create a new project, chances are it hasn’t been proven in anyway just yet. So the answer is also no.

• Can this implementation be broken down and tested without the assistance of engineering?

In this case, the answer is yes because there are other means for StartUp Masters to get the insights they require in order to validate their idea. At this point, they would need to list out possible ways to run the test without the support of engineering.

This might mean something as simple as setting up an automated email to a segment of users that is triggered at the 80% completion mark, asking them to start on the next project.

• Will this smaller test still provide useful insights without requiring substantial effort from multiple teams?

Sending an email is a relatively low effort task on the Marketing side which requires little to no support from Design or Engineering, and which will still provide enough information to validate whether the full feature should be implemented. So the answer is a resounding yes .

As a result, by running their suggested experiment through the MVT Breakdown Board, StartUp Masters is able to avoid a waterfall project and gain useful learnings in a shorter period of time.

Are your experiments at risk of becoming waterfalls? Use this chart to help break your projects down into smaller MVTs.

Step 4: validate your experiments with a checklist.

Sometimes, breaking down an experiment to an MVT is still not enough to validate whether that test is worth including in your growth strategies.

You need to know if it will have a positive impact on your users and their needs as well. Afterall, your job is still to provide a great and valuable experience for your customers.

This is where the Experiment Validation Checklist comes in handy.

As you can see, StartUp Masters follows the “Jobs to Be Done” framework , which focuses on the goals a potential user has, rather than solely focusing on who they are as a person (which is more dependent on marketing to personas).

Here we can see the various “Jobs to Be Done” listed out. Moreover, they are also considering personas as an important factor in how they plan out their experiments.

Of course, they include the probability of success as a factor, the effort required per team and the OKR that is impacted from the experiment.

By getting everyone on your team to use this growth strategy checklist when deciding which experiments to go after, it becomes easier at a first glance to know if all the areas of importance are being considered.

Need help validating your experiments to identify their value?

Step 5: foster accountability in your team.

Lastly, it’s important that everyone on your team understands the work that they are doing, and the value they bring to the company with the growth projects they are running.

By getting specific individuals on your team to share the tests they released, as well as what they learned in a given week, you are encouraging them to consistently produce results .

In your weekly meetings , show the rest of the company what was launched, and what results were achieved. Get each person to speak to their own growth experiments so that they can feel accountable for the work they do .

If there are underperformers that have a tendency to work at a slower pace or reap less valuable insights, this growth strategy template will push them to increase their output.

At any rate, the rest of the company will see who the A-players are , and who is falling short, which is often a wake-up call for the latter.

Start tracking which experiments your team members are working on, and monitoring what results they are getting.

There is no silver bullet or quick “hack” that will lead to explosive growth.

In fact, growth is a long process and requires a strong focus and understanding of the data and metrics that influence the various moving parts of an organization. That is why you need a well thought out growth strategy to really succeed.

You can then start the new year right by setting ambitious business goals, and breaking them down into easily digestible inputs.

By continuing to test out various experiments, and analyzing the results of those experiments–in time you will find that achieving the goals your set for yourself and for your company seem a lot more within reach.

More business communication guides:

30+ Business Report Templates That Every Business Needs [+ Design Tips]

How to make a business plan

Table of Contents

How to make a good business plan: step-by-step guide.

A business plan is a strategic roadmap used to navigate the challenging journey of entrepreneurship. It's the foundation upon which you build a successful business.

A well-crafted business plan can help you define your vision, clarify your goals, and identify potential problems before they arise.

But where do you start? How do you create a business plan that sets you up for success?

This article will explore the step-by-step process of creating a comprehensive business plan.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a formal document that outlines a business's objectives, strategies, and operational procedures. It typically includes the following information about a company:

Products or services

Target market

Competitors

Marketing and sales strategies

Financial plan

Management team

A business plan serves as a roadmap for a company's success and provides a blueprint for its growth and development. It helps entrepreneurs and business owners organize their ideas, evaluate the feasibility, and identify potential challenges and opportunities.

As well as serving as a guide for business owners, a business plan can attract investors and secure funding. It demonstrates the company's understanding of the market, its ability to generate revenue and profits, and its strategy for managing risks and achieving success.

Business plan vs. business model canvas

A business plan may seem similar to a business model canvas, but each document serves a different purpose.

A business model canvas is a high-level overview that helps entrepreneurs and business owners quickly test and iterate their ideas. It is often a one-page document that briefly outlines the following:

Key partnerships

Key activities

Key propositions

Customer relationships

Customer segments

Key resources

Cost structure

Revenue streams

On the other hand, a Business Plan Template provides a more in-depth analysis of a company's strategy and operations. It is typically a lengthy document and requires significant time and effort to develop.

A business model shouldn’t replace a business plan, and vice versa. Business owners should lay the foundations and visually capture the most important information with a Business Model Canvas Template . Because this is a fast and efficient way to communicate a business idea, a business model canvas is a good starting point before developing a more comprehensive business plan.

A business plan can aim to secure funding from investors or lenders, while a business model canvas communicates a business idea to potential customers or partners.

Why is a business plan important?

A business plan is crucial for any entrepreneur or business owner wanting to increase their chances of success.

Here are some of the many benefits of having a thorough business plan.

Helps to define the business goals and objectives

A business plan encourages you to think critically about your goals and objectives. Doing so lets you clearly understand what you want to achieve and how you plan to get there.

A well-defined set of goals, objectives, and key results also provides a sense of direction and purpose, which helps keep business owners focused and motivated.

Guides decision-making

A business plan requires you to consider different scenarios and potential problems that may arise in your business. This awareness allows you to devise strategies to deal with these issues and avoid pitfalls.

With a clear plan, entrepreneurs can make informed decisions aligning with their overall business goals and objectives. This helps reduce the risk of making costly mistakes and ensures they make decisions with long-term success in mind.

Attracts investors and secures funding

Investors and lenders often require a business plan before considering investing in your business. A document that outlines the company's goals, objectives, and financial forecasts can help instill confidence in potential investors and lenders.

A well-written business plan demonstrates that you have thoroughly thought through your business idea and have a solid plan for success.

Identifies potential challenges and risks

A business plan requires entrepreneurs to consider potential challenges and risks that could impact their business. For example:

Is there enough demand for my product or service?

Will I have enough capital to start my business?

Is the market oversaturated with too many competitors?

What will happen if my marketing strategy is ineffective?

By identifying these potential challenges, entrepreneurs can develop strategies to mitigate risks and overcome challenges. This can reduce the likelihood of costly mistakes and ensure the business is well-positioned to take on any challenges.

Provides a basis for measuring success

A business plan serves as a framework for measuring success by providing clear goals and financial projections . Entrepreneurs can regularly refer to the original business plan as a benchmark to measure progress. By comparing the current business position to initial forecasts, business owners can answer questions such as:

Are we where we want to be at this point?

Did we achieve our goals?

If not, why not, and what do we need to do?

After assessing whether the business is meeting its objectives or falling short, business owners can adjust their strategies as needed.

How to make a business plan step by step

The steps below will guide you through the process of creating a business plan and what key components you need to include.

1. Create an executive summary

Start with a brief overview of your entire plan. The executive summary should cover your business plan's main points and key takeaways.

Keep your executive summary concise and clear with the Executive Summary Template . The simple design helps readers understand the crux of your business plan without reading the entire document.

2. Write your company description

Provide a detailed explanation of your company. Include information on what your company does, the mission statement, and your vision for the future.

Provide additional background information on the history of your company, the founders, and any notable achievements or milestones.

3. Conduct a market analysis

Conduct an in-depth analysis of your industry, competitors, and target market. This is best done with a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Next, identify your target market's needs, demographics, and behaviors.

Use the Competitive Analysis Template to brainstorm answers to simple questions like:

What does the current market look like?

Who are your competitors?

What are they offering?

What will give you a competitive advantage?

Who is your target market?

What are they looking for and why?

How will your product or service satisfy a need?

These questions should give you valuable insights into the current market and where your business stands.

4. Describe your products and services

Provide detailed information about your products and services. This includes pricing information, product features, and any unique selling points.

Use the Product/Market Fit Template to explain how your products meet the needs of your target market. Describe what sets them apart from the competition.

5. Design a marketing and sales strategy

Outline how you plan to promote and sell your products. Your marketing strategy and sales strategy should include information about your:

Pricing strategy

Advertising and promotional tactics

Sales channels

The Go to Market Strategy Template is a great way to visually map how you plan to launch your product or service in a new or existing market.

6. Determine budget and financial projections

Document detailed information on your business’ finances. Describe the current financial position of the company and how you expect the finances to play out.

Some details to include in this section are:

Startup costs

Revenue projections

Profit and loss statement

Funding you have received or plan to receive

Strategy for raising funds

7. Set the organization and management structure

Define how your company is structured and who will be responsible for each aspect of the business. Use the Business Organizational Chart Template to visually map the company’s teams, roles, and hierarchy.

As well as the organization and management structure, discuss the legal structure of your business. Clarify whether your business is a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, or LLC.

8. Make an action plan

At this point in your business plan, you’ve described what you’re aiming for. But how are you going to get there? The Action Plan Template describes the following steps to move your business plan forward. Outline the next steps you plan to take to bring your business plan to fruition.

Types of business plans

Several types of business plans cater to different purposes and stages of a company's lifecycle. Here are some of the most common types of business plans.

Startup business plan

A startup business plan is typically an entrepreneur's first business plan. This document helps entrepreneurs articulate their business idea when starting a new business.

Not sure how to make a business plan for a startup? It’s pretty similar to a regular business plan, except the primary purpose of a startup business plan is to convince investors to provide funding for the business. A startup business plan also outlines the potential target market, product/service offering, marketing plan, and financial projections.

Strategic business plan

A strategic business plan is a long-term plan that outlines a company's overall strategy, objectives, and tactics. This type of strategic plan focuses on the big picture and helps business owners set goals and priorities and measure progress.

The primary purpose of a strategic business plan is to provide direction and guidance to the company's management team and stakeholders. The plan typically covers a period of three to five years.

Operational business plan

An operational business plan is a detailed document that outlines the day-to-day operations of a business. It focuses on the specific activities and processes required to run the business, such as:

Organizational structure

Staffing plan

Production plan

Quality control

Inventory management

Supply chain

The primary purpose of an operational business plan is to ensure that the business runs efficiently and effectively. It helps business owners manage their resources, track their performance, and identify areas for improvement.

Growth-business plan

A growth-business plan is a strategic plan that outlines how a company plans to expand its business. It helps business owners identify new market opportunities and increase revenue and profitability. The primary purpose of a growth-business plan is to provide a roadmap for the company's expansion and growth.

The 3 Horizons of Growth Template is a great tool to identify new areas of growth. This framework categorizes growth opportunities into three categories: Horizon 1 (core business), Horizon 2 (emerging business), and Horizon 3 (potential business).

One-page business plan

A one-page business plan is a condensed version of a full business plan that focuses on the most critical aspects of a business. It’s a great tool for entrepreneurs who want to quickly communicate their business idea to potential investors, partners, or employees.

A one-page business plan typically includes sections such as business concept, value proposition, revenue streams, and cost structure.

Best practices for how to make a good business plan

Here are some additional tips for creating a business plan:

Use a template

A template can help you organize your thoughts and effectively communicate your business ideas and strategies. Starting with a template can also save you time and effort when formatting your plan.

Miro’s extensive library of customizable templates includes all the necessary sections for a comprehensive business plan. With our templates, you can confidently present your business plans to stakeholders and investors.

Be practical

Avoid overestimating revenue projections or underestimating expenses. Your business plan should be grounded in practical realities like your budget, resources, and capabilities.

Be specific

Provide as much detail as possible in your business plan. A specific plan is easier to execute because it provides clear guidance on what needs to be done and how. Without specific details, your plan may be too broad or vague, making it difficult to know where to start or how to measure success.

Be thorough with your research

Conduct thorough research to fully understand the market, your competitors, and your target audience . By conducting thorough research, you can identify potential risks and challenges your business may face and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Get input from others

It can be easy to become overly focused on your vision and ideas, leading to tunnel vision and a lack of objectivity. By seeking input from others, you can identify potential opportunities you may have overlooked.

Review and revise regularly

A business plan is a living document. You should update it regularly to reflect market, industry, and business changes. Set aside time for regular reviews and revisions to ensure your plan remains relevant and effective.

Create a winning business plan to chart your path to success

Starting or growing a business can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, a well-written business plan can make or break your business’ success.

The purpose of a business plan is more than just to secure funding and attract investors. It also serves as a roadmap for achieving your business goals and realizing your vision. With the right mindset, tools, and strategies, you can develop a visually appealing, persuasive business plan.

Ready to make an effective business plan that works for you? Check out our library of ready-made strategy and planning templates and chart your path to success.

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How to Write a Growth-Oriented Business Plan

6 min. read

Updated October 27, 2023

The business plan for strategic growth is one of my favorites because it’s about core business decisions, steps, metrics, and making things happen. It matches my vision of business planning as ongoing management and steering a business.

It’s not about explaining or defending a business for outsiders. It’s about what’s supposed to happen.

• Key components of the business plan for strategic growth:
• Milestones and metrics
• Essential business numbers

Let’s look at each of these.

• 1. Strategy

Strategy can be as simple as a list of bullet points, or brief descriptions, or even a series of photos.

Strategy is focus. Strategy is what you’re not doing.

My favorite metaphor is the sculptor with a block of marble—the art is what he chips off the block, not what he leaves in. Michelangelo started with a big chunk of marble and chipped pieces off of it until it was his David. So, strategy in your business plan serves as a reminder of what’s most important.

Michael Porter, who is perhaps the best-known business writer on strategy, said:

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

I’ve worked on business strategy for several decades. I was a VP of a consulting company called “Creative Strategies.” I’ve come to realize that strategy is like driving and sex—we all think we’re pretty good at it.

But simplifying, doing today what will seem obvious tomorrow, is genius. I always say that the best strategies seem obvious as soon as you understand them. Furthermore, it seems to me that if they don’t seem obvious after the fact, they didn’t work.

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Identity, market, and offering

I’ve dealt with dozens of strategy frameworks, and they all work pretty well if applied correctly. Still, my favorite is the one we use with LivePlan: problem, solution, market, and identity (or why us ). Don’t pull them apart. It’s the interrelationship between them that drives your business. Each affects the other two.

The problem you solve

We forget too often, so start with this: Your business is not about you, what you like to do, or what you want from it. It’s about your customers. And, most important, the problem you solve for your customers.

In a social media company that posts updates for its clients, the problem it solves is not social media; it’s getting the word out, and getting people to know you.

My favorite restaurant doesn’t just feed me a meal; it gives me healthy, delicious food, in a comfortable environment, a place I like to be for an hour or two with my wife.

Every business had better be solving a problem. If not, it’s continued existence is threatened.

Your solution

Your solution to the problem above is your product or service. You can already see from the restaurant example that the choice of market influences the business offering. That’s strategy at work.

Your identity influences your choice of market, which influences your choice of product. Your choice of product influences your choice of market. They have to work together.

Target market

Your identity influences your choice of target market . The more tightly identified, the better.

Successful restaurants focus on people in certain areas with defined tastes, price sensitivity (or not), time sensitivity (or not), couples, parents with kids, business travelers, and so on.

What part of the market do you identify with? Who are you most comfortable serving?

Identity (in other words, “why us”)

Every business has its core identity. How are you different from others?

What are your strengths and weaknesses? What is your core competence? What are your goals? What makes you different?

These four choices are your business strategy. The growth in your strategy is what makes the difference.

Is there room in your current strategy to grow the business? Are you looking at a new market, maybe contiguous to your existing market? New products? The genius is finding the opportunity for growth, and managing the steps and resources to make it happen.

Don’t pull the strategy apart. Don’t take the various elements one at a time. Don’t ever stop thinking about them. Remember, in planning as well as in all aspects of business, things change.

Keep watching for this change. Change is the opportunity to grow.

• 2. Execution

Strategy is meaningless without execution.

Execution tactics are the steps, the activities, the decisions you make and paths you take to execute on strategy.

Execution tactics are the key elements of a marketing plan, product plan, and finance plan. Pricing, products, promotion, messaging, channels, social media, support, lead generation—it’s all about execution. And you can’t do a strategic growth plan without working through the tactics that will execute the strategy.

In the plan itself, as with strategy, tactics are only as formal as you need for execution. They are probably simple lists and bullet points. A Lean Plan is a good framework. No need to elaborate if your plan is for your team only, to manage growth. But write them down so you can use them later as reminders, and checklists for analyzing execution. The main use of your plan is for constant review and revision, like a business dashboard.

As you work with tactics, think about strategic alignment . Make sure your tactics match your strategy. If you have a high-price, high-value strategy, make sure your pricing and product offerings match. Make sure your messaging, channels, and promotions match. That’s strategic alignment.

• 3. Milestones and metrics

Your goal is execution, and milestones and metrics inform execution. Think of dates, deadlines, and concrete specifics.

Ask yourself how you’ll know as you execute your strategy whether or not you are on track. People like working toward milestones , and they like seeing their progress marked in specific and concrete metrics.

Metrics are sales and spending, of course . But also, depending on your type of business, other performance indicators like traffic, leads, conversions, presentations, visits, trips, engagements—and even likes, retweets, and follows. Make your metrics measurable and meaningful.

In your strategic growth plan, milestones and metrics are beautifully edited text. They are lists. They are dates, teams, names, and numbers.

• 4. Essential business numbers

Real planning has to be rooted in specifics, including sales, spending, and cash flow.

If you have an existing business, you are probably already managing cash flow and reviewing your performance and against your forecasted numbers regularly.

• 5. From then on, keep it fresh

The business plan is just the first step. From there, your projections lead you gracefully into reviewing plan versus actual results and looking for course corrections.

I call this the planning process, involving regular reviews. You track results, you compare the results to plan, and this year to last year. And you make course corrections, or stay the course, depending on what you decide.

Remember what former president Dwight Eisenhower said: “The plan is useless, but planning is essential.

To learn more about the growth planning process, check out the LivePlan Blog .

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software , a co-founder of Borland International, and a recognized expert in business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching and evangelizing for business planning.

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Growth Tactics

Creating an Effective Business Growth Plan

Last Updated on November 23, 2023 by Milton Campbell

As a business leader, you understand the importance of continually striving for growth and development in your enterprise. A carefully crafted growth plan can help you achieve your goals by outlining specific strategies and action plans to ensure that your company continues to thrive. In this article, we’ll explore the key components of an effective growth plan for your business and offer practical advice to help you create a roadmap to success.

What is a Growth Plan and Why Do You Need One?

A growth plan is a document that outlines the strategies and tactics that a business will use to achieve and sustain growth over a specified period. This plan should include a clear vision statement, measurable goals , and a detailed description of the strategies, action plans, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that will drive business growth. A growth plan can help you set goals and targets, identify potential challenges and opportunities, and ensure that all stakeholders are aligned with your vision. Furthermore, having a growth plan can help ensure the longevity of your business by providing a roadmap for success.

Factors Impacting Business Growth

Several factors can have a significant impact on the growth of a business. It is essential for business leaders and managers to identify and understand these factors in order to navigate the path to success. Let’s explore some key factors that influence business growth:

1. Economic Conditions

The overall health of the economy can greatly affect business growth. During periods of economic prosperity, with increased consumer spending and confidence, businesses tend to experience growth opportunities. Conversely, during economic downturns or recessions , consumer spending may decline, leading to challenges for businesses.

2. Market Demand and Competitiveness

The demand for a product or service has a direct impact on business growth. Assessing the market demand for your offerings, understanding consumer preferences, and identifying any gaps that your business can fill are crucial steps. Additionally, businesses need to evaluate the competitive landscape, including the presence of established competitors, barriers to entry, and emerging trends, in order to position themselves for growth.

3. Innovation and Technology

Keeping up with technological advancements and embracing innovation is essential for sustaining growth. Businesses that invest in research and development, adopt new technologies, and stay ahead of industry trends are often better positioned for growth. Innovation can lead to improved efficiency, enhanced product offerings, and increased customer satisfaction, all of which can drive business growth.

4. Financial Resources

Access to financial resources, such as capital for investment and working capital, is vital for business growth. Adequate funding allows businesses to expand operations, invest in marketing and advertising, develop new products or services, and hire additional staff. Businesses need to assess their financial capabilities and explore funding options to support their growth strategies.

5. Human Capital

The skills, knowledge, and expertise of the workforce are critical for driving business growth. Hiring and retaining talented employees who are aligned with the organization’s goals and values is essential. Businesses that invest in training and development programs, foster a positive work culture , and empower their employees are more likely to experience sustainable growth.

6. Regulatory Environment

The regulatory environment in which a business operates can impact growth opportunities. Compliance with industry-specific regulations, government policies, and legal requirements is crucial to avoid penalties and maintain credibility. Understanding and navigating the regulatory landscape allows businesses to identify potential obstacles and take necessary measures for growth.

7. Customer Satisfaction and Retention

Customer satisfaction and retention play a significant role in business growth. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers, refer others to the business, and contribute to its growth. Businesses need to focus on providing exceptional customer experiences, delivering quality products or services, and maintaining strong customer relationships to foster loyalty and drive growth.

These factors are just some of the many elements that influence business growth. By actively assessing and addressing these factors, businesses can create strategies and make informed decisions that contribute to their long-term success and expansion.

How to Develop a Growth Plan for Your Business

Developing a growth plan for your business is a crucial aspect of achieving long-term success. To create an effective growth plan, follow these steps:

Step 1: Define Your Growth Goals and Objectives

The first step in creating an effective growth plan is to define your goals and objectives. Think about where you want your business to be in three, five, or ten years and develop specific and measurable goals that will help you achieve your vision.

Step 2: Understand Your Business Needs

In order to create a growth plan that works for your business, you need to understand its needs. Consider the following questions:

• What are your business goals?
• Who is your target market?
• What products or services do you offer?
• What are your current strengths and weaknesses?
• What are the potential growth opportunities for your business?

Answering these questions will help you identify specific areas of your business that require additional attention and focus, and help you create a growth plan that addresses them.

Step 3: Develop a Strategy for Growth

Once you have defined your goals and identified the needs of your business, the next step is to develop a strategy for growth. Consider the following:

• What strategies and tactics will best help you achieve your growth goals?
• What internal resources or external partnerships will you need to execute your plan?
• What role will new products or services play in your growth strategy?
• Are there any particular areas of your business that you want to focus on developing?
• How will you measure success and ensure that your strategy is working?

Developing an effective growth strategy requires careful planning and consideration of various factors that can impact your business.

Step 4: Establish an Action Plan

With your growth goals defined, business needs understood, and a strategy created, the next step is to establish an action plan. This plan should outline specific initiatives that will help you achieve your growth targets, including timelines, milestones, resource commitments, and key performance indicators.

Step 5: Monitor and Adjust Your Plan

Developing a successful growth plan requires ongoing monitoring and adjustment to ensure that you remain on track and continue to grow. Regularly review your progress against your KPIs and take corrective action as needed to keep your business moving forward.

Tips for Creating an Effective Growth Plan

When it comes to business growth, creating an effective plan is crucial to achieving your goals and moving your organization forward. Here are some tips to help you create a growth plan that will work for your company:

Set Realistic Goals

It’s important to set goals that are achievable but also challenging. Make sure you consider your current business situation and resources, as well as your desired outcomes when setting your targets.

Understand Your Market

Your target market plays an essential role in your business growth. Ensure you have a deep understanding of your customer’s needs, their pain points, and the challenges they are facing.

Consider All Growth Strategies

Exploring diverse growth strategies can help you expand your business, reach new customers, and diversify your offerings. This could include everything from developing new products and services, expanding into new markets, or improving your operations and processes .

Focus on the Long-term

While short-term objectives are vital for any business, it’s equally critical to have long-term goals in mind. This ensures that you develop a roadmap to move toward your vision and don’t get sidetracked by short-term wins.

Foster an Organizational Culture of Growth

Building this culture starts from the top and should be reflected throughout your organization. Encourage staff to be innovative , take calculated risks, and capitalize on new opportunities and ideas to drive growth forward.

Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

To effectively measure your progress toward your growth goals, it is important to identify and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These indicators can include metrics such as revenue growth, customer acquisition rate, customer satisfaction, market share, or any other relevant metrics specific to your business. Regularly monitoring these KPIs will help you assess if your growth plan is on track and enable you to make informed decisions and adjustments as needed.

Develop a Marketing and Sales Strategy

A strong marketing and sales strategy is crucial to drive business growth. Clearly define your target audience, develop compelling messaging, and identify the most effective channels to reach and engage your potential customers. Leverage digital marketing techniques, social media platforms, content marketing, SEO, and other tactics relevant to your industry to maximize your reach and generate quality leads. Align your marketing and sales efforts to ensure a seamless customer journey that leads to conversions.

Invest in Employee Development

Your employees play a significant role in driving business growth. Invest in their professional development and provide training opportunities to enhance their skill sets. Empower them to take ownership of their responsibilities and encourage a culture of continuous learning and improvement. By fostering a motivated and skilled workforce, you can boost productivity , innovation, and overall business performance.

Foster Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships can be a valuable growth strategy for businesses. Look for complementary organizations or businesses with shared target audiences and explore opportunities for collaboration. By partnering with other businesses, you can tap into new markets, leverage each other’s strengths, share resources, and mutually benefit from the synergies created.

Continuously Monitor and Evaluate Your Plan

Creating a growth plan is not a one-time task; it requires ongoing monitoring and evaluation. Regularly review your progress, reassess your goals, and adjust your strategies as needed. Stay updated on market trends, customer preferences, and industry developments to ensure your growth plan remains relevant and effective. Be agile and adaptable in responding to changes and seeking new opportunities for growth.

Business Plan vs Growth Plan

Business plans and growth plans are essential tools for businesses, but they serve different purposes. While a business plan outlines the basics of a company, including its mission, product offerings, and financial projections, a growth plan focuses specifically on strategies to drive business growth. Let’s explore the differences between the two:

Business Plan

A business plan is a detailed blueprint of a company’s goals and objectives, outlining how it intends to achieve them. It typically includes the following components:

• Executive summary: A brief overview of the company’s mission, goals, and financial projections.
• Company description: A detailed description of the company’s mission, historical background, products or services offered, and target market.
• Market analysis: An overview of the industry, including trends, competition, and target audience.
• Organization and management: An overview of the company’s organizational structure , leadership team, and management style.
• Products and services: A detailed description of the company’s products or services, including pricing, distribution, and marketing strategies.
• Financial projections: Forecasted financial statements, including income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.

A business plan serves as a roadmap for a company’s future, laying out how it plans to operate, grow and succeed.

Growth Plan

A growth plan is a strategic document designed to identify and prioritize strategies to drive business growth. Instead of focusing on the basics of the company like a business plan, a growth plan zooms into the company’s growth opportunities. It typically includes the following components:

• Review of business environment: An overview of the current business conditions and the challenges and opportunities that exist in the market.
• Mission and vision statement: A reaffirmation of the company’s goals and aspirations, and how these will translate into growth strategies.
• Goals and objectives: Specific, measurable objectives that align with the company’s mission and growth aspirations.
• SWOT analysis: An assessment of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Strategies and tactics: A detailed outline of the strategies and tactics that will be used to achieve the company’s goals and objectives.
• Performance metrics: Objective measures that will be used to track and evaluate the success of the growth plan.

A growth plan offers a framework for businesses to identify and prioritize growth opportunities, set realistic growth targets, and develop actionable strategies to achieve those targets.

In summary, while a business plan outlines the basics of a company, including its mission, goals, and financial projections, a growth plan focuses on strategies to drive growth. While both plans are essential for the success of a business, they play different roles in the development and execution of a company’s strategy.

Key Takeaways

Creating an effective growth plan for your business involves identifying your goals and objectives, assessing your business needs, developing a strategy, establishing an action plan, and monitoring and adjusting your plan as needed.

By following these steps and adopting a growth mindset, you can successfully achieve your business goals, help your organization thrive, and continue to grow for years to come. Remember to set realistic, measurable targets, focus on your customers’ needs, and stay open to new opportunities. With a well-constructed growth plan, you can continue to make your business successful and continue to grow.

Related posts:

How to Develop a Strategic Plan for Business Development [Free Template]

Published: May 01, 2023

Business development is usually confused with sales , often overlooked, and only sometimes given the strategic focus it deserves. Having a business development strategy, however, is crucial to long-term success. It ensures that everyone in your company is working toward a common goal.

But how do you develop a business development plan? Pull up a chair and stay awhile, I’m diving into that and more below.

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Business development.

Business development is the practice of identifying, attracting, and acquiring new business to further your company’s revenue and growth goals. How you achieve these goals is sometimes referred to as a business development strategy — and it applies to and benefits everyone at your company.

It’s not unusual to mistake business development with sales, but there’s an important distinction between the two. Business development refers to many activities and functions inside and outside the traditional sales team structure. In some companies, business development is part of the larger sales operations team. In others, it’s part of the marketing team or sits on its own team altogether.

Because business development can look so different among industries and businesses, the strategy behind this function is expansive. Below, we outline each step in the strategy and how to apply it to your business development plan.

Business Development Strategy

• Understand your competitive landscape.
• Choose effective KPIs.
• Develop long-term customer relationships.
• Implement customer feedback.
• Keep your website content and user interface fresh.
• Speed up your response time.
• Leverage a sales plan to identify areas of growth.
• Implement a social listening strategy.
• Sponsor industry organizations, conferences, and events.

1. Understand your competitive landscape.

Before you can develop a strategic plan to drive business growth, you must have a solid understanding of the competitive landscape in your industry. When you know who your ideal customer is and what problem they are looking to solve with your product or service, research who else is providing a viable solution in your industry.

Identify other companies operating in your space. What features do their products have? How competitive is their pricing? Do their systems integrate with other third-party solutions? Get crystal-clear on what the competition is offering so you know how to differentiate your product to your customers.

Featured Resource: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates

2. Choose effective KPIs.

How will you know if your business development efforts are successful? Ensure you can measure your goals with relevant, meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect the health of your business. The result of these metrics should give you a strong indication of how effective your business development efforts are.

Featured Resource: Sales Metrics Calculator Dashboard

3. Develop long-term customer relationships.

Do you engage with your customers even after the deal has been closed? If not, it’s time to develop a plan to keep your buyers engaged. Building long-term relationships with your customers pays off. A grand majority of a company's business comes from repeat customers, and returning customers are cheaper to convert. Indeed, it’s famously known that it costs five times more to convert new customers than it does to sell to returning customers.

Not only are repeat customers easier to sell to, they can also provide valuable feedback and insights to help you improve your business. Additionally, customer testimonials can be used for valuable content that can attract your next buyer.

4. Implement customer feedback.

If and when you have customers who are willing to provide feedback on your sales process and offerings, make sure you hear them out and implement it. Your customers offer a unique, valuable perspective because they chose your product over the competition — their insights can help shape your strategy to keep your business ahead of the curve.

5. Keep your website content and user interface fresh.

When was the last time your company had a website refresh? Can you ensure that all links are working, that your site is easy to navigate, and that it is laid out and intuitive for those who want to buy from you?

Keeping your website up-to-date and easy to use can make or break the sale for customers who know they are ready to buy. Don’t make it too difficult for potential customers to get in touch with you or purchase your product directly (if that suits your business model).

6. Speed up your response time.

How fast your sales team responds to your leads can make or break your ability to close the deal. If you notice your sales process has some lag time that prevents you from responding to prospects as soon as possible, these could be areas to prioritize improvement.

7. Leverage a sales plan to identify areas of growth.

No business development strategy is complete without a sales plan . If you’ve already established a plan, make sure to unify it with your business development efforts. Your plan should outline your target audience, identify potential obstacles, provide a “game plan” for sales reps, outline responsibilities for team members, and define market conditions.

While a sales plan primarily affects your sales team, it can inform the activities of your business development reps. A sales plan can help them understand where the business needs growth — whether it’s in a new vertical, a new audience, or a new need that’s recently come to light in the industry.

Not sure how to create a sales plan? Download the following template to get started.

Featured Resource: Sales Plan Template

8. Implement a social listening strategy.

While social listening is mainly used in a marketing and customer service context, it’s also an essential practice for business development. There are more than 4 billion social media users worldwide. Naturally, social media is one of the best places to hear directly from consumers and businesses — without needing to reach out to them first.

In business development, you can use social listening to track what the general public is saying about your brand, industry, product offerings, product category, and more. It can help you identify key weaknesses in the industry, making it a prime opportunity to be the first to address those pitfalls.

Use a social listening tool to pick up on trends before they gain traction.

9. Sponsor industry organizations, conferences, and events.

A key facet of business development is reaching potential customers where they are. One of the easiest ways to do that is by sponsoring industry organizations, conferences, and events. This strategy will guarantee that your business development reps get valuable face-to-face time with your business’ target audience. The additional visibility can also help establish your business as a leader in the field.

Now that you understand what business development entails, it's time to create a plan to set your strategy in motion.

How to Develop a Strategic Plan

When we refer to a business development strategic plan, we’re referring to a roadmap that guides the whole company and requires everyone’s assistance to execute successfully and move your customer through the flywheel . With a plan, you’ll close more deals and quantify success.

Let’s go over the steps you should take to create a strategic plan.

1. Download our strategic plan template .

First, download our free growth strategy template to create a rock-solid strategic plan. With this template, you can map a growth plan for increasing sales, revenue, and customer acquisition rates. You can also create action plans for adding new locations, creating new product lines, and expanding into new regions.

Featured Resource: Strategic Plan Template

2. Craft your elevator pitch.

What is your company’s mission and how do you explain it to potential clients in 30 seconds or less? Keeping your elevator pitch at the forefront of all strategic planning will remind everyone what you’re working toward and why.

Some people believe the best pitch isn’t a pitch at all , but a story. Others have their favorite types of pitches , from a one-word pitch to a Twitter pitch that forces you to boil down your elevator pitch to just 280 characters.

Find the elevator pitch that works best for your reps, company, and offer, and document it in your business development strategy.

3. Include an executive summary.

You’ll share your strategic plan with executives and maybe even board members, so it’s important they have a high-level overview to skim. Pick the most salient points from your strategic plan and list or summarize them here.

You might already have an executive summary for your company if you’ve written a business proposal or value proposition . Use this as a jumping off point but create one that’s unique to your business development goals and priorities.

Once your executives have read your summary, they should have a pretty good idea of your direction for growing the business — without having to read the rest of your strategy.

3. Set SMART goals.

What are your goals for this strategy? If you don’t know, it will be difficult for your company and team to align behind your plan. So, set SMART goals . Remember, SMART stands for:

Featured Resource: SMART Goal Setting Template

Download the template now.

If one of your goals is for 5% of monthly revenue to come from upsells or cross-sells, make this goal specific by identifying what types of clients you’ll target.

Identify how you’ll measure success. Is success when reps conduct upsell outreach to 30 clients every month, or is it when they successfully upsell a customer and close the deal? To make your goal attainable, ensure everyone on your team understands who is responsible for this goal: in this case, sales or business development reps.

This goal is relevant because it will help your company grow, and likely contributes to larger company-wide goals. To make it time-based, set a timeline for success and action. In this case, your sales team must achieve that 5% upsell/cross-sell number by the end of the quarter.

4. Conduct SWOT analysis.

SWOT is a strategic planning technique used to identify a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Before conducting a SWOT, identify what your goal is. For example, “We’d like to use SWOT to learn how best to conduct outreach to prospective buyers.”

Once you’ve identified what you’re working toward, conduct market research by talking with your staff, business partners, and customers.

Next, identify your business’ strengths. Perhaps you have low employee turnover, a central location that makes it easy to visit with prospects in person, or an in-demand feature your competitors haven’t been able to mimic.

Featured Resource: Market Research Kit with SWOT Analysis Template

Your business’ weaknesses are next. Has your product recently glitched? Have you been unable to successfully build out a customer service team that can meet the demands of your customers?

Then, switch to opportunities. For example, have you made a new business partnership that will transition you into a previously untapped market segment?

What are the threats? Is your physical space getting crowded? What about your market space? Is increasing competition an issue?

Use SWOT results to identify a better way forward for your company.

5. Determine how you’ll measure success.

You’ve identified strengths and weaknesses and set SMART goals , but how will you measure it all ? It’s important for your team to know just how they will be measured, goaled, and rewarded. Common key performance indicators (KPIs) for business development include:

• Company growth
• Lead conversion rate
• Leads generated per month
• Client satisfaction
• Pipeline value

6. Set a budget.

What will your budget be for achieving your goals? Review financial documents, historical budgets, and operational estimates to set a budget that’s realistic.

Once you have a “draft” budget, check it against other businesses in your industry and region to make sure you’re not overlooking or misjudging any numbers. Don’t forget to factor in payroll, facilities costs, insurance, and other operational line items that tend to add up.

7. Identify your target customer.

Who will your business development team pursue? Your target market is the group of customers your product/service was built for. For example, if you sell a suite of products for facilities teams at enterprise-level companies, your target market might be facilities or janitorial coordinators at companies with 1000+ employees. To identify your target market:

• Analyze your product or service
• Check out the competition
• Choose criteria to segment by
• Perform research

Your target customer is the person most likely to buy your product. Do your homework and make sure your business development plan addresses the right people. Only then will you be able to grow your business.

8. Choose an outreach strategy.

What tactics will you use to attract new business for your sales team to close? You might focus on a single tactic or a blend of a few. Once you know who your target market is and where they “hang out,” then you can choose an appropriate outreach strategy.

Will your business development plan rely heavily on thought leadership such as speaking at or attending conferences? Will you host a local meetup for others in your industry? Or will your reps network heavily on LinkedIn and social media?

If referrals will be pivotal to your business’ growth, consider at which stage of the buying process your BDRs will ask for referrals. Will you ask for a referral even if a prospect decides they like your product/service but aren’t a good fit? Or will you wait until a customer has been using your solution for a few months? Define these parameters in your strategy.

Upselling and Cross-Selling

Upselling and cross-selling are a cost-effective way of growing your business. But it’s important that this tactic is used with guardrails. Only upsell clients on features that will benefit them as well as your bottom line. Don’t bloat client accounts with features or services they really don’t need — that’s when turnover and churn start to happen.

Sponsorship and Advertising

Will your BDR work with or be on the marketing team to develop paid advertising campaigns? If so, how will your BDRs support these campaigns? And which channels will your strategy include? If you sell a product, you might want to feature heavily on Instagram or Facebook. If you’re selling a SaaS platform, LinkedIn or Twitter might be more appropriate.

What’s your outreach strategy? Will your BDRs be held to a quota to make 25 calls a week and send 15 emails? Will your outreach strategy be inbound , outbound , or a healthy combination of both? Identify the outreach guardrails that best match your company values for doing business.

Strategic Plan Example

Let’s put all of these moving parts in action with a strategic plan example featuring good ol’ Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.

Elevator Pitch Example for Strategic Plan

Dunder Mifflin is a local paper company dedicated to providing excellent customer support and the paper your business needs to excel today and grow tomorrow.

Here are some additional resources for inspiration:

• Elevator Pitch Examples to Inspire Your Own
• Components of an Elevator Pitch

Executive Summary Example for Strategic Plan

At Dunder Mifflin, our strengths are our customer service, speed of delivery, and our local appeal. Our weakness is that our sales cycle is too long.

To shorten the sales cycle 5% by the end of Q4, we need to ask for more referrals (which already enjoy a 15% faster sales cycle), sponsor local professional events, and outreach to big box store customers who suffer from poor customer support and are more likely to exit their contract. These tactics should allow us to meet our goal in the agreed-upon timeline.

• How to Write an Incredibly Well-Written Executive Summary [+ Example]
• Executive Summary Template

SMART Goals Example for Strategic Plan

Dunder Mifflin’s goal is to decrease our sales cycle 5% by the end of Q4. We will do this by more proactively scheduling follow-up meetings, sourcing more qualified, ready-to-buy leads, and asking for 25% more referrals (which have a 15% shorter sales cycle already). We will measure success by looking at the sales pipeline and calculating the average length of time it takes a prospect to become closed won or closed lost.

• 5 Dos and Don'ts When Making a SMART Goal [Examples]
• How to Write a SMART Goal
• SMART Marketing Goals Template

SWOT Analysis Example for Strategic Plan

Strengths: Our strengths are our reputation in the greater Scranton area, our customer service team (led by Kelly Kapoor), and our warehouse team, who ship same-day reams to our customers — something the big box stores cannot offer.

Weaknesses: Our greatest weakness is that our sales team has been unable to successfully counter prospects who choose big box stores for their paper supply. This results in a longer-than-average sales cycle, which costs money and time.

Opportunities: Our greatest business opportunity is to conduct better-targeted outreach to prospects who are ready to buy, ask for more referrals from existing customers, and follow up with closed lost business that’s likely coming up on the end of an annual contract with a big box store.

Threats: Our biggest threat is large box stores offering lower prices to our prospects and customers and a sales cycle that is too long, resulting in low revenue and slow growth.

• How to Conduct Competitive Analysis
• How to Run a SWOT Analysis for Your Business [+ Template]
• SWOT Analysis Template and Market Research Kit

Measurement of Success Example for Strategic Plan

We will measure success by looking at the sales pipeline and calculating the average length of time it takes a prospect to become closed won or closed lost.

Budget Example for Strategic Plan

You've laid out the SMART goals and the way you'll measure for success. The budget section's goal is to estimate how much investment it will take to achieve those goals. This will likely end up being a big-picture overview, broken down into a budget by a program or a summary of key investments. Consider laying it out in a table format like so:

• Budgeting Templates
• How to Write an Incredible Startup Marketing Budget

Target Customer Example for Strategic Plan

Our target customer is office managers at small- to medium-sized companies in the greater Scranton, PA area. They are buying paper for the entire office, primarily for use in office printers, custom letterhead, fax machines. They are busy managing the office and value good customer service and a fast solution for their paper needs.

• How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
• Make My Persona Tool

Outreach Strategy Example for Strategic Plan

Networking, sponsorships, and referrals will be our primary mode of outreach. We will focus on networking at regional paper conferences, HR conferences, and local office manager meetups. We will sponsor local professional events. And we will increase the volume of referrals we request from existing customers.

Create a Strategic Plan for Business Development

Without a strategic plan, you can invest resources, time, and funds into business development initiatives that won't grow your business. A strategic plan is crucial as it aligns your business development and sales teams. With a solid business development strategic plan, everyone will be working toward the greater good of your company.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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• What is strategic planning? A 5-step gu ...

What is strategic planning? A 5-step guide

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. In this article, we'll guide you through the strategic planning process, including why it's important, the benefits and best practices, and five steps to get you from beginning to end.

Strategic planning is a process through which business leaders map out their vision for their organization’s growth and how they’re going to get there. The strategic planning process informs your organization’s decisions, growth, and goals.

Strategic planning helps you clearly define your company’s long-term objectives—and maps how your short-term goals and work will help you achieve them. This, in turn, gives you a clear sense of where your organization is going and allows you to ensure your teams are working on projects that make the most impact. Think of it this way—if your goals and objectives are your destination on a map, your strategic plan is your navigation system.

In this article, we walk you through the 5-step strategic planning process and show you how to get started developing your own strategic plan.

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What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a business process that helps you define and share the direction your company will take in the next three to five years. During the strategic planning process, stakeholders review and define the organization’s mission and goals, conduct competitive assessments, and identify company goals and objectives. The product of the planning cycle is a strategic plan, which is shared throughout the company.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is the end result of the strategic planning process. At its most basic, it’s a tool used to define your organization’s goals and what actions you’ll take to achieve them.

Typically, your strategic plan should include: 

Your company’s mission statement

Your organizational goals, including your long-term goals and short-term, yearly objectives

Any plan of action, tactics, or approaches you plan to take to meet those goals

What are the benefits of strategic planning?

Strategic planning can help with goal setting and decision-making by allowing you to map out how your company will move toward your organization’s vision and mission statements in the next three to five years. Let’s circle back to our map metaphor. If you think of your company trajectory as a line on a map, a strategic plan can help you better quantify how you’ll get from point A (where you are now) to point B (where you want to be in a few years).

When you create and share a clear strategic plan with your team, you can:

Build a strong organizational culture by clearly defining and aligning on your organization’s mission, vision, and goals.

Align everyone around a shared purpose and ensure all departments and teams are working toward a common objective.

Proactively set objectives to help you get where you want to go and achieve desired outcomes.

Promote a long-term vision for your company rather than focusing primarily on short-term gains.

Ensure resources are allocated around the most high-impact priorities.

Define long-term goals and set shorter-term goals to support them.

Assess your current situation and identify any opportunities—or threats—allowing your organization to mitigate potential risks.

Create a proactive business culture that enables your organization to respond more swiftly to emerging market changes and opportunities.

What are the 5 steps in strategic planning?

The strategic planning process involves a structured methodology that guides the organization from vision to implementation. The strategic planning process starts with assembling a small, dedicated team of key strategic planners—typically five to 10 members—who will form the strategic planning, or management, committee. This team is responsible for gathering crucial information, guiding the development of the plan, and overseeing strategy execution.

Once you’ve established your management committee, you can get to work on the planning process. 

Step 1: Assess your current business strategy and business environment

Before you can define where you’re going, you first need to define where you are. Understanding the external environment, including market trends and competitive landscape, is crucial in the initial assessment phase of strategic planning.

To do this, your management committee should collect a variety of information from additional stakeholders, like employees and customers. In particular, plan to gather:

Relevant industry and market data to inform any market opportunities, as well as any potential upcoming threats in the near future.

Customer insights to understand what your customers want from your company—like product improvements or additional services.

Employee feedback that needs to be addressed—whether about the product, business practices, or the day-to-day company culture.

Consider different types of strategic planning tools and analytical techniques to gather this information, such as:

A balanced scorecard to help you evaluate four major elements of a business: learning and growth, business processes, customer satisfaction, and financial performance.

A SWOT analysis to help you assess both current and future potential for the business (you’ll return to this analysis periodically during the strategic planning process). 

To fill out each letter in the SWOT acronym, your management committee will answer a series of questions:

What does your organization currently do well?

What separates you from your competitors?

What are your most valuable internal resources?

What tangible assets do you have?

What is your biggest strength? 

Weaknesses:

What does your organization do poorly?

What do you currently lack (whether that’s a product, resource, or process)?

What do your competitors do better than you?

What, if any, limitations are holding your organization back?

What processes or products need improvement? 

Opportunities:

What opportunities does your organization have?

How can you leverage your unique company strengths?

Are there any trends that you can take advantage of?

How can you capitalize on marketing or press opportunities?

Is there an emerging need for your product or service? 

What emerging competitors should you keep an eye on?

Are there any weaknesses that expose your organization to risk?

Have you or could you experience negative press that could reduce market share?

Is there a chance of changing customer attitudes towards your company? 

Step 2: Identify your company’s goals and objectives

To begin strategy development, take into account your current position, which is where you are now. Then, draw inspiration from your vision, mission, and current position to identify and define your goals—these are your final destination. 

To develop your strategy, you’re essentially pulling out your compass and asking, “Where are we going next?” “What’s the ideal future state of this company?” This can help you figure out which path you need to take to get there.

During this phase of the planning process, take inspiration from important company documents, such as:

Your mission statement, to understand how you can continue moving towards your organization’s core purpose.

Your vision statement, to clarify how your strategic plan fits into your long-term vision.

Your company values, to guide you towards what matters most towards your company.

Your competitive advantages, to understand what unique benefit you offer to the market.

Your long-term goals, to track where you want to be in five or 10 years.

Your financial forecast and projection, to understand where you expect your financials to be in the next three years, what your expected cash flow is, and what new opportunities you will likely be able to invest in.

Step 3: Develop your strategic plan and determine performance metrics

Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, it’s time to put pen to paper. Take your current business position and strategy into account, as well as your organization’s goals and objectives, and build out a strategic plan for the next three to five years. Keep in mind that even though you’re creating a long-term plan, parts of your plan should be created or revisited as the quarters and years go on.

As you build your strategic plan, you should define:

Company priorities for the next three to five years, based on your SWOT analysis and strategy.

Yearly objectives for the first year. You don’t need to define your objectives for every year of the strategic plan. As the years go on, create new yearly objectives that connect back to your overall strategic goals . 

Related key results and KPIs. Some of these should be set by the management committee, and some should be set by specific teams that are closer to the work. Make sure your key results and KPIs are measurable and actionable. These KPIs will help you track progress and ensure you’re moving in the right direction.

Budget for the next year or few years. This should be based on your financial forecast as well as your direction. Do you need to spend aggressively to develop your product? Build your team? Make a dent with marketing? Clarify your most important initiatives and how you’ll budget for those.

A high-level project roadmap . A project roadmap is a tool in project management that helps you visualize the timeline of a complex initiative, but you can also create a very high-level project roadmap for your strategic plan. Outline what you expect to be working on in certain quarters or years to make the plan more actionable and understandable.

Step 4: Implement and share your plan

Now it’s time to put your plan into action. Strategy implementation involves clear communication across your entire organization to make sure everyone knows their responsibilities and how to measure the plan’s success. 

Make sure your team (especially senior leadership) has access to the strategic plan, so they can understand how their work contributes to company priorities and the overall strategy map. We recommend sharing your plan in the same tool you use to manage and track work, so you can more easily connect high-level objectives to daily work. If you don’t already, consider using a work management platform .  

A few tips to make sure your plan will be executed without a hitch: 

Communicate clearly to your entire organization throughout the implementation process, to ensure all team members understand the strategic plan and how to implement it effectively. 

Define what “success” looks like by mapping your strategic plan to key performance indicators.

Ensure that the actions outlined in the strategic plan are integrated into the daily operations of the organization, so that every team member's daily activities are aligned with the broader strategic objectives.

Utilize tools and software—like a work management platform—that can aid in implementing and tracking the progress of your plan.

Regularly monitor and share the progress of the strategic plan with the entire organization, to keep everyone informed and reinforce the importance of the plan.

Establish regular check-ins to monitor the progress of your strategic plan and make adjustments as needed. 

Step 5: Revise and restructure as needed

Once you’ve created and implemented your new strategic framework, the final step of the planning process is to monitor and manage your plan.

Remember, your strategic plan isn’t set in stone. You’ll need to revisit and update the plan if your company changes directions or makes new investments. As new market opportunities and threats come up, you’ll likely want to tweak your strategic plan. Make sure to review your plan regularly—meaning quarterly and annually—to ensure it’s still aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.

Keep in mind that your plan won’t last forever, even if you do update it frequently. A successful strategic plan evolves with your company’s long-term goals. When you’ve achieved most of your strategic goals, or if your strategy has evolved significantly since you first made your plan, it might be time to create a new one.

Build a smarter strategic plan with a work management platform

To turn your company strategy into a plan—and ultimately, impact—make sure you’re proactively connecting company objectives to daily work. When you can clarify this connection, you’re giving your team members the context they need to get their best work done. 

A work management platform plays a pivotal role in this process. It acts as a central hub for your strategic plan, ensuring that every task and project is directly tied to your broader company goals. This alignment is crucial for visibility and coordination, allowing team members to see how their individual efforts contribute to the company’s success. 

By leveraging such a platform, you not only streamline workflow and enhance team productivity but also align every action with your strategic objectives—allowing teams to drive greater impact and helping your company move toward goals more effectively. 

Strategic planning FAQs

Still have questions about strategic planning? We have answers.

Why do I need a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is one of many tools you can use to plan and hit your goals. It helps map out strategic objectives and growth metrics that will help your company be successful.

When should I create a strategic plan?

You should aim to create a strategic plan every three to five years, depending on your organization’s growth speed.

Since the point of a strategic plan is to map out your long-term goals and how you’ll get there, you should create a strategic plan when you’ve met most or all of them. You should also create a strategic plan any time you’re going to make a large pivot in your organization’s mission or enter new markets. 

What is a strategic planning template?

A strategic planning template is a tool organizations can use to map out their strategic plan and track progress. Typically, a strategic planning template houses all the components needed to build out a strategic plan, including your company’s vision and mission statements, information from any competitive analyses or SWOT assessments, and relevant KPIs.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. business plan?

A business plan can help you document your strategy as you’re getting started so every team member is on the same page about your core business priorities and goals. This tool can help you document and share your strategy with key investors or stakeholders as you get your business up and running.

You should create a business plan when you’re: 

Just starting your business

Significantly restructuring your business

If your business is already established, you should create a strategic plan instead of a business plan. Even if you’re working at a relatively young company, your strategic plan can build on your business plan to help you move in the right direction. During the strategic planning process, you’ll draw from a lot of the fundamental business elements you built early on to establish your strategy for the next three to five years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. mission and vision statements?

Your strategic plan, mission statement, and vision statements are all closely connected. In fact, during the strategic planning process, you will take inspiration from your mission and vision statements in order to build out your strategic plan.

Simply put: 

A mission statement summarizes your company’s purpose.

A vision statement broadly explains how you’ll reach your company’s purpose.

A strategic plan pulls in inspiration from your mission and vision statements and outlines what actions you’re going to take to move in the right direction. 

For example, if your company produces pet safety equipment, here’s how your mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan might shake out:

Mission statement: “To ensure the safety of the world’s animals.” 

Vision statement: “To create pet safety and tracking products that are effortless to use.” 

Your strategic plan would outline the steps you’re going to take in the next few years to bring your company closer to your mission and vision. For example, you develop a new pet tracking smart collar or improve the microchipping experience for pet owners. 

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. company objectives?

Company objectives are broad goals. You should set these on a yearly or quarterly basis (if your organization moves quickly). These objectives give your team a clear sense of what you intend to accomplish for a set period of time. 

Your strategic plan is more forward-thinking than your company goals, and it should cover more than one year of work. Think of it this way: your company objectives will move the needle towards your overall strategy—but your strategic plan should be bigger than company objectives because it spans multiple years.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a business case?

A business case is a document to help you pitch a significant investment or initiative for your company. When you create a business case, you’re outlining why this investment is a good idea, and how this large-scale project will positively impact the business. 

You might end up building business cases for things on your strategic plan’s roadmap—but your strategic plan should be bigger than that. This tool should encompass multiple years of your roadmap, across your entire company—not just one initiative.

What’s the difference between a strategic plan vs. a project plan?

A strategic plan is a company-wide, multi-year plan of what you want to accomplish in the next three to five years and how you plan to accomplish that. A project plan, on the other hand, outlines how you’re going to accomplish a specific project. This project could be one of many initiatives that contribute to a specific company objective which, in turn, is one of many objectives that contribute to your strategic plan. 

What’s the difference between strategic management vs. strategic planning?

A strategic plan is a tool to define where your organization wants to go and what actions you need to take to achieve those goals. Strategic planning is the process of creating a plan in order to hit your strategic objectives.

Strategic management includes the strategic planning process, but also goes beyond it. In addition to planning how you will achieve your big-picture goals, strategic management also helps you organize your resources and figure out the best action plans for success. 

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Choosing to grow: The leader’s blueprint

Growth is something every CEO and business leader aspires to deliver, but for many, it remains elusive. About a quarter of companies don’t grow at all, and between 2010 and 2019, only one in eight achieved more than 10 percent revenue growth annually. 1 Statistics in this section are based on McKinsey’s analysis of data from Corporate Performance Analytics by McKinsey and regulatory filings, S&P Global, for the period 2010–19. Sustained, profitable growth is possible, however, and it comes down to “choice.”

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Michael Birshan , Biljana Cvetanovski , Rebecca Doherty , Tjark Freundt , Andre Gaeta, Greg Kelly , Erik Roth , Ishaan Seth , and Jill Zucker , representing views from McKinsey’s Growth, Marketing & Sales and Strategy & Corporate Finance practices.

Do you, as a leader, make an explicit choice to grow? Or do you pay lip service to your growth ambitions and let your resolve falter if profit isn’t immediate?

When sustainable, inclusive, and profitable growth becomes a conscious, resolute choice, it shapes decision making across every area of the business. Growth becomes the oxygen of an organization, feeding the culture, elevating ambitions, and inspiring a sense of purpose. Growth leaders generate 80 percent more shareholder value than their peers over a ten-year period. Beyond creating shareholder value, growth attracts talent, fosters innovation, and creates jobs.

With only one in ten S&P 500 companies reporting growth above GDP for more than 30 years, sustained, profitable growth may seem difficult. But the choice to grow is paramount—and it is available to every leader, regardless of industry or economic climate. Indeed, many high-growth companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Burger King, Hyatt Hotels, Microsoft, and Airbnb, to name a few, were founded during economic downturns.

Incumbents have also achieved impressive growth during downturns. US-based retailer Target managed to deliver growth during each of the last two recessions. In 2000, Target doubled down on growth investments, adding new locations, products, and partnerships that resulted in double-digit growth for sales and profits. In 2008, Target analyzed customer trends and expanded its food offerings to include more fresh meat and produce; the food category has since added billions to annual revenue. In 2020, Target achieved record growth during the COVID-19 pandemic by investing consistently in online services and accelerating its ability to use stores as distribution centers and enable online-order pickups from their parking lots. 2 Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen, “Roaring Out of Recession,” Harvard Business Review , March 2010.

The leaders who choose growth and outperform their peers not only think, act, and speak differently; they align around a shared mindset, strategy, and capabilities. In turn, they actively track leading and lagging growth indicators to tie their aspirations to clear and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). They explore and invest in opportunities both within and outside their core business. Their commitment to growth leads them to invest in an appropriate mix of enablers at the right time and scale, and they stay resolutely faithful to their growth vision in the face of unexpected challenges in their business and operating context, even turning disruption to their advantage.

Drawing on McKinsey’s extensive research into growth and leadership as well as our experience in partnering with leaders in every sector on sustainable, profitable growth , this article explores what happens when business leaders make and follow through on a purposeful choice to grow. 3 For more, see Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White, The Alchemy of Growth , Basic Books, September 1999; Mehrdad Baghai, Patrick Viguerie, and Sven Smit, The granularity of growth: How to identify the sources of growth and drive enduring company performance , John Wiley & Sons, 2007. The leader’s blueprint for growth shows how subtle changes in thoughts and actions arising from choice can make the difference between sustained standout growth and remaining with the pack.

When a business leader chooses growth, that choice begins to shape behavior, mindset, risk appetite, and investment decisions, creating a growth orientation across the organization. In fact, growth leaders across the C-suite are 70 percent more likely than peers to have growth as their top priority. 4 Biljana Cvetanovski, Eric Hazan, Jesko Perrey, and Dennis Spillecke, “ Are you a growth leader? The seven beliefs and behaviors that growth leaders share ,” McKinsey, September 26, 2019.

Growth-oriented leaders also shape their thinking and actions toward growth over both short- and long-term horizons. They react decisively to shorter-term disruptions that can be turned into opportunities—what we term “ timely jolts ”—and build organizational resilience and agility to respond to change and leverage disruption. These leaders follow a timeless blueprint for growth that flows from mindset into growth pathways and execution (Exhibit 1).

Set an aspirational mindset and culture

C-suite growth leaders share a common series of mindsets and behaviors from their communications to their willingness to learn through failure. Those who display at least three of the five key growth mindsets are 2.4 times more likely to profitably outgrow their peers (Exhibit 2).

The first part of the timeless holistic growth blueprint is to support aspirations with clear targets, milestones, and motivators—creating a North Star that feeds the broader strategic and cultural narrative of the business. Leaders are able to commit their company to action and maintain this focus in the face of timely jolts, inspiring an organization-wide culture that continually seeks out and pursues growth opportunities.

On the other hand, the leader who aspires to growth but underinvests in initiatives or removes funding from growth is one whose actions do not match their aspirations. C-suite leaders who choose growth are much less likely to yield when challenges arise, finding opportunity in headwinds and reasons to innovate where others retreat to conventional defensive playbooks.

A further differentiator of growth leaders is their ability to build organizational buy-in, including from the board and investors. They tend to directly involve the board in their growth planning and they proactively communicate with investors 5 For more, see “ Where companies with a long-term view outperform their peers ,” McKinsey Global Institute, February 8, 2017. using significant and credible targets to show how the growth plan will generate value. Growth leaders allocate the resources required to achieve goals and are more willing to change their operating model to enable growth, if that is what is needed.

Activate the growth pathways

When leaders choose growth and develop the right leadership mindsets and behaviors to support that choice, their natural position is to look for opportunity wherever it exists. Those companies that set growth strategies to address all available pathways to growth are 97 percent more likely to achieve profitable above-peer growth.

The second part of the timeless holistic growth blueprint is activating three pathways: expanding the core business, innovating into new markets and adjacencies, and purposefully pursuing opportunities for breakthrough growth through new-business building or mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

The most successful companies are able to balance and sequence these growth choices in response to their changing operating environments, advances in technology, and emerging customer needs and preferences.

Mindset to action: Imperatives for Growth

Expand the core business.

Growth begins with the core, and growth leaders understand the importance of optimizing their current core business. With more than 80 percent of total revenue growth, on average, derived from the core, achieving excellence in current operations is crucial. 6 Statistics in this section are based on McKinsey’s analysis of data from Corporate Performance Analytics by McKinsey, regulatory filings, and S&P Global, for the period 2005–19; we have analyzed the 3,000 largest public companies as of 2018 reporting revenues by segment. Total revenue growth split is derived from the summation of the respective company segment revenues in this sample. Some sectors—healthcare, for example—achieve as much as 90 percent of growth from the core business, while others, such as financial services, generate around 74 percent from the core and 23 percent or more from adjacent opportunities (Exhibit 3).

These variations are partly explained by the idiosyncrasies of different industries. For example, healthcare businesses make long-term R&D and capital investments for innovation, but their patents enable them to generate most of their growth within the core. Financial-services companies, on the other hand, tend to be more able to move into adjacent services, with many companies actively making big bets across industry sub-sectors (eg, investment banks entering wealth management, and vice versa).

Regardless of industry, growth leaders turbocharge their core through a mix of strategic shifts to higher growth pockets (for example, shifting product mix to higher growth value or premium segments and higher growth channels such as e-commerce), innovation of the core products and services, and improved executional excellence in their commercial capabilities.

Having a growth mindset is especially important for the core business. Growth outperformers almost always grow their core—either through their main products, sectors, or local market. In fact, it is unlikely that they can raise their growth trajectory without winning in their local market. 7 Defined as the largest region in the portfolio by revenue.  In fact, fewer than one in five of the companies in our sample that had below-average growth rates in their local region managed to outperform their peers in growth.

Whatever the exact mix of strategies and focus areas, growth leaders are maximizing their core through all available means. And they are twice as likely to report having identified pockets of growth within their existing business.

Innovate into adjacencies

Having a strong core is essential. Outperformers build beyond it to achieve their growth aspirations. Businesses that expand into adjacent industries or segments are 20 percent more likely to achieve greater growth than their peers.

The obvious places to look for growth are new geographies and adjacent industries where growth leaders can adapt their existing offerings to serve new customer segments. For example, CVS Health transformed into a consumer-centric, integrated health solutions company by expanding its business from pharmacy and retail to healthcare services, which accounted for 67 percent of the company’s revenue growth from 2005–19.

Growth leaders recognize the need to unlock the next wave of growth through expansion beyond the core. However, choosing the best adjacencies is critical. Growth leaders are increasingly harnessing advanced analytics to identify promising or previously overlooked opportunities that leverage core competencies and provide a good chance to establish a strong leadership position. McKinsey research shows that businesses that expand to adjacencies with high similarity to their core and exploit their unique competitive advantages are more likely to profitably outperform their peers on growth.

Outperformers use the full growth blueprint to excel in adjacencies, with a particular focus on strategies that build on core competencies. They use and refresh growth maps to consistently surface opportunities, to understand which are most achievable, and set growth strategies to capture them. They choose among the different avenues to grow adjacently, such as M&A or business building, and they evolve their operating models to support these growth choices.

Growth leaders are also increasingly building ecosystems around their core capabilities and assets and deploying new offerings into adjacent products or markets. Tencent, for instance, has become an Asian tech giant worth around $500 billion through its online platforms that include messaging, gaming, payments, e-commerce and advertising—in addition to evolving its social messaging app WeChat into an extensive “super app.” Tencent’s full ecosystem offering spans fintech , entertainment and media, cab hailing, location sharing, and more, fueling a revenue compound annual growth rate of 28 percent over the decade 2011 to 2021.

Ignite breakout businesses

According to McKinsey research on more than 1,000 business leaders, on average, executives believe 50 percent of their revenues will come from new products, services, or businesses within the next five years. Not surprisingly, many are looking beyond natural adjacencies to exploit entirely new business opportunities. Between 2018 and 2020, “new-business building” doubled its appearances among the top three items on executive agendas.

Expanding into new markets through business building can unlock new opportunities without cannibalizing existing products and services. Done right, the rewards can be well worth the risk, as illustrated by a number of growth leaders across different industries.

Amazon famously expanded beyond its e-commerce business into public cloud services through Amazon Web Services (AWS). By leveraging its core competencies of brand and commercial strength, it built AWS into a business that generated $62 billion revenue.

Science and technology innovator Danaher Corporation combatted the single-digit growth in its core industrial businesses by looking toward high-growth markets in life sciences and niche diagnostics. After testing the waters with small acquisitions and investing heavily in its platforms business, Danaher spun off its old industrial core, Fortive, repositioned life sciences and diagnostics as its new core business—and beat the S&P 500 by 3.8 times between 2002 and 2016. While core growth is critical, investments in breakout opportunities could enable a long-term shift to a new core within a higher-growth market.

Marcus by Goldman Sachs launched its first digital consumer business in 2016, allowing customers to bank from their phones. In the ensuing six years, it has attracted millions of customers, accumulated deposits of over $92 billion, and made more than $7 billion in loans via a combination of organic growth, acquisitions, and partnerships with Apple and Amazon.

Growth leaders can improve their odds of achieving growth in breakout opportunities by committing to innovation , identifying and understanding the needs and wants of valued customers, and developing the right value propositions to appeal to them. Given the accelerating pace of innovation, growth leaders also look to agile methodologies , strategic alliances, and M&A, with a willingness to rapidly test and learn, fail and iterate, and invest in scaling opportunities.

Of course, pursuing breakout growth can require longer-term investment and commitment before seeing returns. That’s why growth leaders need the mettle to stay the course and make significant investments—or the sense to know when to call it quits.

Execute with excellence

This is the critical and third portion of the timeless holistic growth blueprint, where strategy meets action, and orchestrated execution is the final step in achieving growth. Execution works hand-in-hand with strategy to empower leaders to make the right choices at the right time to drive both short-term and long-term growth.

Leaders who choose growth support their ambitions by prioritizing a critical set of execution enablers: operating model and resource allocation, ecosystems, M&A, joint ventures and alliances, and functional capabilities.

Built-for-growth operating models and resource allocation

Leaders who fully commit to growth choose these initiatives for purposeful and assertive investment and are 60 percent more likely to regularly reallocate resources from lower-return to higher-return spaces. These leaders fund more dynamically, relying less on historical budgets that can be psychologically “anchoring,” and they actively explore how to fuel growth without eroding their existing core businesses. 8 Tim Koller, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony, “ Bias busters: Being objective about budgets ,” McKinsey Quarterly , September 28, 2018; Michael Birsham, Marja Engel, and Olivier Sibony, “ Avoiding the quicksand: Ten techniques for more agile corporate resource allocation ,” McKinsey Quarterly , October 1, 2013.

Alongside this willingness to dynamically reallocate resources , growth leaders are more likely to have multiple, tailored operating models to support their unique growth initiatives and opportunities. While the core business may have a distinct, more traditional operating model, breakout opportunities may adopt a more agile, learning-driven operating approach , for example, having small, cross-functional teams with the autonomy to focus on rapidly building and testing products, features, or services with customers. They segment their product-development processes and combine standard product-development stage gates for incremental innovations while using venture-capital-inspired stage gates and funding mechanisms for bolder growth projects. This agility helps them respond robustly to timely jolts and opportunities.

In managing performance, growth leaders adopt a growth vocabulary, leveraging the adage, “You get what you measure.” They actively track leading and lagging growth-oriented metrics, such as recurring revenue, revenue per customer, and customer-acquisition cost, tying them to organizational goals and incentives.

Strengthen ecosystems, M&A, and joint ventures

Specialization in a sea of sameness is a differentiator. That’s why growth leaders often look outside of their businesses to find quick access to complementary skills and capabilities to buy or scale innovation and growth. Those who do this are 30 to 50 percent more likely to continually scan for these types of alliances, joint ventures, and M&A opportunities.

In recent years, digital M&A has become increasingly popular and effective, accounting for double the share of all M&A value from 2011–21. Businesses are becoming increasingly strategic about how they evaluate and leverage these digital transactions, from acquiring new talent and capabilities to accessing new markets and products. 9 Michael Bogobowicz, Anika Pflanzer, Leandro Santon, and Brett Wilson, “ How to find and maximize digital value in any M&A deal ,” McKinsey, November 9, 2020; CapitaIQ, McKinsey analysis. Many companies with programmatic M&A strategies (that is, steadily growing through two or more acquisitions of less than 30 percent of their own market cap per year) have added digital-investment themes to their M&A blueprints. Over almost 20 years of research, it has become clear that programmatic M&A is the only M&A strategy that delivers outsized total shareholder return (TSR) . M&A investment themes, especially those on digital M&A, should be highly specific and clearly articulate how they will add value for the acquirer.

Forming ecosystems with partners is another way to build capabilities and expand offerings more quickly, while simultaneously enhancing customer experience and enlarging reach and innovation opportunities across the ecosystem. This creates value along two dimensions—it allows participants to consolidate a range of customers, often across sectors, and to play a pivotal role in optimizing touchpoints in both B2C and B2B.

Functional capabilities

Execution is impossible without the right functional strengths and growth leaders identify which new functional capabilities are needed—or need to change—to support growth initiatives, both in the short term and over longer-term innovation horizons.

From building out AI and advanced analytics platforms to deepening their customer experience capabilities—and even enhancing or modernizing existing capabilities like pricing and marketing—growth leaders ensure the organization’s capabilities are positioned to fuel growth. While the exact blend varies by industry and company, a common cross-sectoral focus point is harnessing digital and analytics to revamp distribution, marketing returns, customer value management (CVM), 10 Customer value management is a systematic approach to working with loyal customers. It is based on personalized offerings targeted to meet particular customer needs, created using advanced analytics, and aimed at increasing lifetime customer value through raising purchasing frequency and average basket size. and dynamic pricing. 11 Rachel Diebner, David Malfara, Kevin Neher, Mike Thompson, and Maxence Vancauwenberghe, “ Prediction: The future of CX ,” McKinsey Quarterly , February 24, 2021; Ralph Breuer, Kedar Naik, Bogdan Toma, and Martina Yanni, “ Executive quick take: A guide to implementing marketing-and-sales transformations that unlock sustainable growth ,” McKinsey, September 23, 2019; Matt Deimund, Michael Drory, Daniel Law, and Maria Valdivieso, “ The five things sales-growth winners do to invest in their people ,” McKinsey, October 9, 2018; Minti Ray, Stefano Redaelli, Sidney Santos, Jared Sclove, and Andrew Wong, “ Accelerating revenue growth through tech-enabled commercial excellence ,” McKinsey, December 4, 2019.

In distribution, e-commerce is a powerful lever for collecting valuable digital customer data along the purchasing journey and ensuring effective and measurable media spend. Nike, for example, was able to increase its nike.com e-commerce platform’s contribution to sales from 7.5 percent to 24 percent, thereby fuelling a compound annual growth rate of 6.7 percent from 2017–21, a time frame that includes the height of the pandemic. 12 Statista, ecommerceDB, and S&P Capital IQ.

For customer value management, investing in greater personalization through advanced analytics and digital capabilities can improve both the customer experience and client lifetime value. American Express, for instance, leverages advanced analytics to provide customized recommendations to customers based on their location, opening additional transaction opportunities both for their partners and for their own credit cards.

Greater analytical sophistication enables companies to differentiate pricing across dimensions such as region, channel, and customer lifecycle. 13 Claus Heintzeler, Mathias Kullman, Karin Lauer, and Maximilian Totzauer, “ Pricing and promotions: The analytics opportunity ,” McKinsey, June 28, 2021. A leading Asian e-commerce company was able to increase gross margins by ten percentage points and gross merchandise value by three percentage points by developing a dynamic pricing capability. 14 Gadi BenMark, Sebastian Klapdor, Mathias Kullmann, and Ramji Sundararajan, “ How retailers can drive profitable growth through dynamic pricing ,” McKinsey, March 27, 2017.

Commercial capabilities are bolstered by investments in digital—in fact, growth leaders are 60 percent more likely to have successfully used AI and advanced analytics to predict customer behaviors and become a “sensing and predicting” organization. Growth leaders also tend to invest in expanding and deepening their customer experience capabilities to streamline and personalize customer journeys.

Beyond the commercial excellence, growth leaders map R&D and product development portfolios, balanced across incremental innovations and bolder long-term breakout initiatives with clear mapping to the capabilities needed to execute. Tangentially, it is imperative to ensure that growth leaders are investing in their people, creating a pipeline of talent that will help strengthen and broaden the tools needed to achieve their growth aspirations.

Choosing to grow: the subtle difference between success and failure

The growth blueprint defines the timeless elements on which leaders need to focus diligently once they’ve made a deliberate and purposeful choice to grow.

This blueprint prepares an organization to grow in the face of timely jolts. The blueprint encourages leaders to answer a series of clear questions:

• Am I setting the right aspiration, mindset, and culture to encourage growth? Are my ambitions high enough, and how can I ensure my organization has the full potential to achieve it?
• Am I actively choosing growth opportunities across my core and adjacencies?
• Am I establishing the right enablers to execute against my growth aspirations and strategies?
• Do I have the right operating model and resource allocation to achieve my growth ambitions?
• And am I investing in the right functional capabilities?

The choices leaders make in response to these questions differentiate those who achieve growth from those who aspire to it but don’t get results.

Take two leaders of similar-sized businesses operating in the same market. Both see an opportunity for growth and pursue it, but their outcomes are very different. Why?

The one who made a choice to grow aligned their board and leadership team on the company’s direction and dedicated the necessary resources to growth. They adapted the operating model for the long term and understood the risk profile of the new businesses they were trying to build. They invested meaningfully in building the right functional capabilities, sometimes at the expense of a few quarters of earnings, to achieve their long-term growth aspirations.

The other leader, who didn’t explicitly “choose growth,” also did a lot of things right. They hired the right talent and took the time to understand the new businesses they wanted to build. They believed they were allocating enough resources to growth, but ultimately their focus was divided by an emphasis on quarterly earnings and short-term profitability. Though they aspired to growth, they didn’t have the long-term strategy or commitment to achieve it. They tried to protect the management team so they could meet their short-term goals but didn’t secure buy-in from the board for long-term growth initiatives.

Making the conscious choice to grow creates powerful momentum that orients the entire business toward that goal, from the C-suite to frontline employees. The growth blueprint defines the timeless elements on which leaders need to focus diligently once they have made a deliberate and purposeful choice to grow. It also prepares an organization to unlock growth opportunities in timely jolts. The clarity of purpose and vision that comes from choice is what helps leaders and their teams believe in the seemingly impossible and make it happen.

Michael Birshan is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office, where Biljana Cvetanovski is a partner; Rebecca Doherty is a partner in the San Francisco office; Tjark Freundt is a senior partner in the Hamburg office; Andre Gaeta is an associate partner in the Sao Paulo office; Greg Kelly is a senior partner in the Atlanta office; Erik Roth is a senior partner in the Stamford office; Ishaan Seth and Jill Zucker are senior partners in the New York office.

The authors wish to thank Jaidit Brar, Luis Cerquiera, Vincent Cremers, Brian Gregg, Eric Hazan, Martin Hirt, Anna Koivuniemi, Pablo Leon, Duncan Miller, and Dennis Spillecke for their contributions to this article.

We are also grateful to the many McKinsey colleagues who contributed their industry expertise and perspectives to this research: Marco Aukofer, Matt Banholzer, Kurt Bazarewski, Dani Ebersole, Stephen Guerin, Tim Koller, Karin Löffler, Katherine Lovemore, Patrick McCurdy, Sakina Mehenni, Camille Meeùs, Bridget Morton, Michael Park, Tido Röder, Jeff Rudnicki, Manny Sasson, Balint Stellek, Marija Vukojevic, Qian Wan, and Michelle Wycoff.

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Igniting your next growth business

Business Growth Strategy Framework: Blueprint for Accelerated Success

By GGI Insights | April 8, 2024

Table of contents

Businesses risk not only falling behind their competitors but also losing significant market share and profitability. A growth strategy encompasses a series of deliberate actions designed to increase a company’s customer base, enhance its market presence, and ultimately boost its revenue and profits.

It involves identifying and capitalizing on new opportunities, optimizing existing operations, and continuously adapting to changes in the market and consumer behavior. Moreover, a solid growth strategy is essential for success as it provides a clear vision and direction, aligns team efforts towards common goals, and facilitates informed decision-making processes. By prioritizing strategic growth, businesses can ensure they not only survive but thrive, outpacing competitors and securing their place as industry leaders.

What is a Business Growth Strategy Framework?

A Business Growth Strategy Framework is a structured approach that outlines how a company plans to expand and increase its market share, revenue, and profitability. This comprehensive framework combines various methodologies, tools, and models to identify growth opportunities, set realistic objectives, and devise actionable strategies. It serves as a roadmap for businesses, guiding them through the complexities of scaling operations, entering new markets, innovating products, and enhancing customer experiences. By systematically evaluating internal capabilities and external market conditions, the framework ensures that growth initiatives are aligned with the company’s vision and resources, making strategic expansion both deliberate and manageable. Imagine a business growth strategy framework as the architect's blueprint for constructing a towering skyscraper. Just as the blueprint encompasses detailed plans—from the foundation's depth to the materials used and the building's design—the framework covers all facets of growth, including market analysis, competitive positioning, and financial forecasting. Each element of the framework is like a floor added to the skyscraper, built on the strength of the underlying structure and designed to reach higher, aiming for the sky. This analogy underscores the importance of a well-thought-out framework that supports sustainable growth, ensuring that each step forward is both strategic and secure. Implementing a Business Growth Strategy Framework involves continuous learning, adaptation, and resilience. It's about more than just plotting a course; it's about navigating the unpredictable currents of the business world with agility and foresight. Success requires not only identifying the right strategies but also but also implementing effective business scaling strategies . Monitoring progress, evaluating results, and making adjustments as necessary. This dynamic process fosters a culture of innovation and continuous improvement within the organization, empowering businesses to seize new opportunities, overcome challenges, and achieve their growth ambitions. Through this meticulous approach, companies can build a lasting legacy, turning bold visions of expansion into reality and setting new benchmarks for success in their respective industries.

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Understanding the Importance of a Growth Strategy

A growth strategy is a roadmap that outlines how a business plans to expand its operations and increase revenue over a specified period. It is an essential tool for businesses of all sizes and industries as it provides a clear view of their goals and the path to achieving them.

Incorporating effective business growth strategies is critical for any organization that wants to stay competitive and relevant in today's fast-paced business environment.  A well-defined growth strategy can help businesses achieve their goals by providing a clear direction and focus. It allows businesses to identify growth opportunities, develop new products or services, and enter new markets , thereby enhancing market penetration .

What is a Business Growth Strategy?

A business growth strategy is a plan for achieving short and long-term goals, including increasing revenue, expanding into new markets, optimizing operations, and improving customer satisfaction. It provides businesses with a roadmap to achieving growth, including identifying opportunities and challenges, defining clear and measurable goals, and outlining the strategies and tactics required to achieve them.

One of the critical components of a growth strategy is market research. Understanding the market and its trends can help businesses identify new growth opportunities. It also helps businesses stay ahead of the competition by identifying emerging trends and technologies that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage.

Another important aspect of a growth strategy is innovation. Businesses need to innovate to remain relevant and competitive continuously. Innovation can take many forms, such as developing new products or services, improving existing ones, or adopting new technologies and processes.

Why is a Growth Strategy Essential for Success?

A business without a growth strategy is like a ship without a captain. It may wander aimlessly, lose its way, and eventually sink into oblivion. However, by setting clear growth goals, carefully analyzing opportunities and challenges, and executing a well-crafted plan, businesses can navigate their way to success and leave their competitors in their wake. With a growth strategy in place, you can chart a course towards sustainable success and ensure a prosperous future.

Additionally, a growth strategy can help attract and retain top talent. Employees are more likely to be motivated and engaged when they work for a company with a clear vision and a growth plan. Additionally, a growth strategy can help businesses build a strong brand and reputation, increasing customer loyalty and trust.

Accurately and clearly defining growth goals, analyzing opportunities and challenges, and executing a well-thought-out plan, helps businesses set themselves apart and achieve their goals.

Key Elements of a Successful Business Growth Strategy

When it comes to business growth, there are several crucial factors that need to be taken into consideration. Let's explore the most important elements that can help your business achieve long-term growth and success.

Setting Clear Business Goals

The first element of a successful growth strategy is setting clear and measurable goals. Businesses need to define what they want to achieve and by what timeline. This could include increasing sales by a certain percentage, expanding to new markets, or introducing new products or services.

When setting goals, it's important to ensure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help businesses stay focused and motivated and allow them to track their progress toward achieving their objectives.

Understanding Your Market

The second critical element is understanding your market. Community engagement for businesses is key in this aspect, as it involves connecting with your target audience to gather valuable insights. By conducting market research, which includes actively engaging with the community, businesses can identify their target audience, along with needs, wants, pain points, and preferences. It also helps businesses stay ahead of the competition by identifying emerging trends and technologies that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage. .

Market research can help businesses make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and pricing. It can also help identify new opportunities and potential threats, allowing them to stay ahead of the competition.

Developing a Unique Value Proposition

The next step is to develop a unique value proposition that differentiates your business from competitors. So start thinking about developing unique products and services, providing exceptional customer service, or offering competitive pricing. 

A strong value proposition can help businesses attract and retain customers , build brand loyalty, and increase market share. It's important to regularly review and refine your value proposition to ensure it remains relevant and competitive.

Investing in Your Team

Another important element of a successful growth strategy is investing in your team. This includes hiring and retaining top talent, providing ongoing training and development opportunities, and fostering a positive and supportive company culture.

When employees feel valued and supported, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated, leading to increased productivity and better business outcomes.

Expanding Your Reach

Always be on the lookout for opportunities to expand the reach of your business. Think about expanding into new geographic markets, developing strategic partnerships with other businesses, or leveraging digital marketing channels to reach new audiences.

Expanding your reach can help your business increase brand awareness, attract new customers, and drive revenue growth. However, it's important to carefully evaluate potential opportunities and ensure they align with your overall growth strategy. 

By focusing on these key elements, businesses can develop a comprehensive growth strategy that will help them achieve long-term success and profitability.

Steps to Create a Business Growth Strategy Framework

Creating a business growth strategy framework is essential for any business that wants to succeed in the long term. A growth strategy framework helps businesses identify their unique value proposition, assess their internal and external environments, and develop an action plan to achieve their growth goals. Here are the steps to create a business growth strategy framework:

1. Defining Goals and Unique Value Propositions

The first step in creating a business growth strategy framework is defining your goals and identifying your unique value proposition. Setting clear and specific goals is crucial because it provides a clear direction for your business and helps you stay focused on what needs to be achieved. These goals should also be measurable, meaning you should establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your progress and determine if you are on the right track.

Additionally, your goals should be achievable, meaning they should be realistic and attainable within a given timeframe. It's important to set goals that challenge your business, but also ones that are within reach. This will help motivate your team and keep them engaged in the growth process.

Relevance is another important aspect of setting goals. Your goals should align with your overall business strategy and be relevant to your industry and market. They should be directly related to the growth and success of your business and contribute to your long-term vision.

Your goals should be time-bound, meaning they should have a specific deadline or timeline for completion. This provides a sense of urgency and helps you prioritize your efforts and resources effectively.

In addition to setting clear goals, it's equally important to identify your unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is what sets your business apart from the competition and makes it attractive to your target audience. It defines the unique benefits and value that your products or services offer to customers.

To identify your unique value proposition, you need to understand your target audience's needs, pain points, and preferences. This requires thorough market research and analysis to gain insights into your customers and competitors. By understanding what your customers are looking for and how your competitors are positioning themselves, you can develop a value proposition that addresses those needs and stands out in the market.

Your unique value proposition should be clearly defined and communicated to your target audience. It should highlight the key benefits and advantages your business offers and explain why customers should choose you over your competitors. It should be compelling, concise, and easy to understand.

By defining your goals and identifying your unique value proposition, you lay the foundation for a strong business growth strategy framework. These elements will guide your decision-making process, help you prioritize your efforts, and ensure that you are focusing on the right areas for growth and success.

2. Conducting a SWOT Analysis

Once businesses have defined their goals and identified their unique value proposition, the next step is to conduct a SWOT analysis. This helps identify the business's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT analysis can help identify opportunities to capitalize on strengths, address weaknesses, and mitigate potential threats.

For example, a business may identify that one of its strengths is its highly skilled workforce, but one of its weaknesses is its outdated technology. By recognizing these factors, the business can develop a comprehensive strategy to invest in new technology and train its employees to stay ahead of the competition.

To address the weakness of outdated technology, the business can conduct thorough research on the latest advancements in their industry. They can explore various options and identify the most suitable technology solutions that align with their goals and objectives. This might involve upgrading their hardware and software systems, implementing automation tools, or adopting innovative digital platforms.

Once the technology upgrades are in place, the business can focus on training its employees to effectively utilize and leverage the new technology. This may involve providing specialized training programs, workshops, or online courses to ensure that all employees have the necessary skills and knowledge to operate the new systems. Additionally, the business can encourage a culture of continuous learning and development, where employees are motivated to stay updated with the latest industry trends and technologies.

By investing in new technology and providing training opportunities, the business can not only address the weakness of outdated technology but also transform it into a strength. With advanced technology at their disposal, the business can streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and enhance productivity. This can give them a competitive edge in the market and position them as industry leaders.

By empowering their employees with the necessary skills and knowledge, the business can foster a culture of innovation and adaptability. Employees who are equipped with up-to-date technology skills can contribute to the growth and success of the business by identifying new opportunities, implementing creative solutions, and driving continuous improvement.

By recognizing the weakness of outdated technology and taking proactive steps to invest in new technology and train employees, businesses can overcome this challenge and stay ahead of the competition. Embracing technological advancements and empowering employees with the necessary skills can lead to increased efficiency, improved performance, and overall business growth.

3. Identifying Growth Opportunities

Once businesses have assessed their internal and external environments, they can begin to identify growth opportunities. This could involve expanding into new markets, developing new products or services, investing in technological advancements, or developing strategic partnerships.

Expanding into a new geographic market is a promising growth opportunity for businesses looking to increase their customer base and drive revenue growth. By conducting thorough market research and developing a targeted marketing strategy, businesses can successfully enter the new market and establish a strong presence.

Market research is a crucial step in understanding the new geographic market and its unique characteristics. This involves analyzing demographic data, consumer behavior, and market trends to gain insights into the target audience. By understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points, businesses can tailor their products or services to effectively meet customer demands.

Once the market research is complete, businesses can develop a targeted marketing strategy to reach and engage the new audience. This strategy should focus on creating awareness, generating interest, and ultimately converting prospects into loyal customers. It may involve utilizing various marketing channels such as digital advertising, social media campaigns, content marketing, and local partnerships.

Digital advertising can be a powerful tool in reaching the new audience, as it allows businesses to target specific demographics and geographic locations. By creating compelling ad campaigns and optimizing them for maximum visibility, businesses can effectively capture the attention of potential customers in the new market.

Social media campaigns can also play a significant role in expanding into a new geographic market. By creating engaging and shareable content, businesses can increase brand awareness and reach a wider audience. Additionally, leveraging influencer partnerships or collaborating with local organizations can help businesses establish credibility and gain trust within the new market.

Content marketing is another effective strategy for entering a new geographic market. By creating valuable and informative content that addresses the needs and interests of the target audience, businesses can position themselves as industry experts and build a loyal following. This can drive organic traffic to their website or physical store, ultimately leading to increased customer acquisition and business growth.

Forming strategic partnerships with local businesses or organizations can provide businesses with valuable connections and resources in the new market. By collaborating with established players or industry influencers, businesses can tap into their existing customer base and gain instant credibility. This can significantly accelerate the growth process and increase market share in the new geographic market.

Expanding into a new geographic market is an exciting growth opportunity for businesses. By conducting thorough market research, developing a targeted marketing strategy, and leveraging various marketing channels, businesses can successfully enter the new market and increase their customer base. It's important to approach this expansion with careful planning and execution to ensure long-term success and profitability.

4. Developing an Action Plan

The final step is developing an action plan that outlines the tactics required to achieve growth goals. This includes brainstorming and implementing innovative business growth ideas , such as developing a marketing strategy, investing in new technology, hiring additional staff, or implementing a sales strategy. You must execute your action plan in a structured and phased manner, with measurable outcomes to evaluate success

For example, a business may develop an action plan to invest in new technology by researching the latest advancements and identifying the best solutions. They may then implement the new technology in a phased manner, training employees and measuring outcomes to ensure success.

To successfully implement the new technology, the business should start by conducting thorough research on the latest advancements in their industry. This could involve attending industry conferences, consulting with experts, and exploring various technology options. By staying updated with the latest trends and advancements, the business can identify the most suitable technology solutions that align with their goals and objectives.

Once the research is complete, the business can develop a detailed implementation plan. This plan should outline the specific steps and timelines for acquiring and installing the new technology. It should also include a budget and resource allocation to ensure a smooth implementation process.

During the implementation phase, it is crucial to provide comprehensive training to employees. This training can be in the form of workshops, seminars, or online courses, depending on the complexity of the technology. The goal is to ensure that all employees have the necessary skills and knowledge to operate the new systems effectively.

Measuring outcomes is an essential part of the implementation process. By setting key performance indicators (KPIs) and regularly monitoring progress, the business can evaluate the success of the new technology implementation. This could involve tracking metrics such as increased productivity, reduced costs, improved customer satisfaction, or faster turnaround times. By analyzing these outcomes, the business can make necessary adjustments and optimize the technology's usage for maximum benefits.

Successful implementation of new technology can provide numerous benefits to a business. It can streamline operations, enhance productivity, improve customer service, and give the business a competitive edge. However, it is essential to approach the implementation process strategically and systematically. By conducting thorough research, developing a detailed implementation plan, providing comprehensive training, and measuring outcomes, businesses can ensure the success of their technology investments and drive growth and success.

Implementing Your Business Growth Strategy

As a business owner, you know that growth is essential for the success of your business. Implementing a growth strategy involves a lot of planning, hard work, and dedication. However, it is not enough to have a growth plan in place. You need to ensure that your team is aligned with the strategy, and you need to monitor and adjust your plan regularly to ensure that it remains effective and relevant.

Aligning Your Team with the Growth Strategy

Aligning your team with the growth strategy is critical to the success of your business. You must ensure that your team understands the business's vision, mission, and goals and how their respective roles align with the growth strategy. This will help ensure a cohesive and collaborative approach to achieving growth goals.

One way to align your team with the growth strategy is to provide them with regular updates on the plan's progress. This will help keep everyone on the same page and ensure everyone is working towards the same goals. You can also encourage your team to provide feedback on the plan and suggest improvements on how to scale business growth.

Another way to align your team with the growth strategy is to provide them with the necessary resources and training. This will help them develop the skills and knowledge they need to contribute to the growth of the business. You can also recognize and reward employees who make significant contributions to the growth of the business. 

Monitoring and Adjusting Your Strategy

Monitoring and adjusting your growth strategy is essential to ensure that it remains effective and relevant. Start by analyzing performance metrics, conducting market research, and making necessary adjustments to the plan. 

One way to monitor the success of your growth strategy is to track key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are measurable values that indicate how well your business is performing. Examples of KPIs include revenue growth, customer retention, and website traffic.

Market research is another essential aspect of monitoring your growth strategy. It involves gathering information about your target market, competitors, and industry trends. This information can help you identify new opportunities for growth and make necessary adjustments to your plan.

It is also important to have flexibility and willingness to adjust your growth strategy as needed. The business landscape is constantly changing, and what worked in the past may not work in the future. So, by monitoring your growth strategy and making necessary adjustments, you can ensure your business remains competitive and successful.

Common Pitfalls in Developing a Business Growth Strategy

Developing a business growth strategy is crucial for any business to achieve success and sustain growth. However, business must avoid several common pitfalls to ensure their growth plans are successful. Lets explore some of these pitfalls in more details.

Avoiding Over Expansion

One of the most common pitfalls in developing a business growth strategy is overexpansion . While it may be tempting to expand quickly and aggressively, businesses must ensure that they have the necessary resources and infrastructure to support their growth plans. Overexpansion can result in overstretching resources, lower quality, and reduced efficiency.

Businesses must carefully assess their current resources and capabilities and determine if they are prepared to handle the demands of growth. To do this, evaluate financial resources, workforce, technology, and operational processes. You can avoid the pitfalls of overexpansion and set your business up for sustained success, by taking a measured and strategic approach to expansion,.

Ignoring Customer Feedback

Another common pitfall in developing a business growth strategy is ignoring customer feedback. Customer reviews or feedback is a critical component of any growth strategy, as it provides valuable insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points. Businesses must engage with their customers regularly and incorporate feedback into their growth strategy.

Ignoring customer insights can lead to customer dissatisfaction, loss of loyalty, and, ultimately, a decline in revenue. Instead, actively seeking out and listening to customer feedback, can help identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions about your growth strategy. These decisions might include developing new products or services, improving existing offerings, or enhancing the overall customer experience.

The Path to Sustainable Business Growth

A well-crafted growth strategy is crucial for attaining sustainable business expansion. By establishing clear objectives, comprehending the market, and developing a distinctive value proposition, businesses can uncover opportunities for growth.

Additionally, aligning the team, monitoring performance, and making necessary adjustments to your plan are vital steps in the growth strategy process . Businesses can outpace their competitors, establish themselves as industry leaders, and achieve long-term success, by steering clear of common pitfalls.

In the journey toward sustainable business growth, the pathway is not just about setting goals but about charting a strategic course that navigates through the complexities of market dynamics, customer preferences, and technological advancements. The Business Growth Strategy Framework acts as a compass, guiding businesses through uncharted waters to achieve accelerated success. This architectural blueprint for growth emphasizes the importance of a solid foundation built on understanding market needs, leveraging unique value propositions, and continuously adapting to the ever-evolving business landscape. As businesses implement this framework, it becomes evident that growth is not a destination but a continuous voyage of discovery, innovation, and adaptation. Implementing a Business Growth Strategy Framework is akin to constructing a skyscraper with resilience and flexibility at its core. Each step, from identifying growth opportunities to developing actionable plans, requires meticulous attention to detail, strategic foresight, and an unwavering commitment to excellence. It's about building layer upon layer of strategic initiatives that are robust yet adaptable, ensuring the business can not only withstand but thrive amidst the winds of change. The real-time tracking of data, as facilitated by tools like HubSpot CRM, enables businesses to stay agile, making informed decisions that propel them forward in their growth journey. The essence of a successful business growth strategy lies in its execution—aligning team efforts, fostering a culture of continuous learning, and being nimble enough to pivot when necessary. It demands a holistic approach that encompasses not just the pursuit of growth for its own sake but a dedicated effort to deliver value, enhance customer experiences, and build lasting relationships. As businesses navigate this path, they must also be mindful of potential pitfalls such as overexpansion and ignoring customer feedback, which can derail even the most well-intentioned growth strategies. The blueprint for accelerated business success is not static but a dynamic, evolving strategy that requires businesses to be proactive, responsive, and innovative. By embracing the principles outlined in the Business Growth Strategy Framework, companies can unlock their full potential, achieving not just growth but a sustainable competitive advantage that sets them apart in the marketplace. The journey to growth is challenging, yet with the right strategy, resilience, and a focus on delivering exceptional value, businesses can ascend to new heights, transforming their growth aspirations into tangible realities.

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10 Business Growth Strategies + Successful Examples

Casey O'Connor

What Is a Business Growth Strategy?

How to develop a business growth strategy, 10 business growth strategies explained, examples of successful growth strategies, tips for business growth in 2023.

All businesses, regardless of size or industry, hope to achieve growth in their lifetime. 

The specific intended outcomes of business growth goals will vary depending on the size of your company, its strengths and needs, and its position in the market. 

Unfortunately, although all businesses aim to grow, only 25% of them make it to 15 years of operation. Effective methods and strategies must be executed correctly in order to expand; this is where business growth strategies come into play.

A business growth strategy is a framework of the actions a business will take to meet their growth goals, and can help your organization achieve them for scalable success. 

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about business growth strategies, including what they are, how to develop one, and ten of the most effective ones available for businesses today. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to Develop a Business Growth Strategy 

A business growth strategy is an outline of the methods, tactics, and specific actions an organization will use to meet business goals. 

Business growth strategies can help businesses achieve a variety of different goals. 

Some business growth strategies are focused on revenue, while others prioritize the size of the customer base. 

Some business growth strategies are all about increasing an organization’s physical presence (opening a new store location, for example), while others are about developing new products or marketing to new audiences. 

A business growth strategy is basically an action plan, based on relevant market research, that explains exactly how your business will grow. It’s designed to help businesses capture more market share.

The specifics of your business growth strategy will depend on the unique needs of your business.

That being said, the process of developing the framework for new business growth strategies is more or less the same each time. 

1. Perform Market Research

Solid business growth strategies are always based on recent and relevant market data. 

Thorough market research will give you insight into current and potential customer preferences, industry trends, and your company’s position in the market relative to its competitors. 

It’s extremely important to get the lay of the land, so to speak, before you design your business growth strategy. Effective business growth goals need to be created using context from the overall market.

2. Establish Goals

You can’t have a business growth strategy without concrete goals. 

In the beginning, try to plan short-term goals. Your business growth strategies should be focused on month-long or quarter-long periods as you get started. This will enable your team to go through the goal-setting and strategy-planning process quickly and frequently.

3. Identify Your Growth Strategy

There are a number of different specific growth strategies for your team to consider that may meet your growth needs. The growth strategy you choose will ultimately depend on your organization’s budget, opportunities, competition , and goals. 

We’ll go over some of the most effective business growth strategies in the next section of this article. 

4. Map Out Your Execution Plan

Once the high-level planning is complete, it’s time to outline the exact actions your team will take to meet your growth goals. 

5. Create a Forecast

6. Monitor, Measure, and Optimize

Once you start executing your business growth strategy, you need to monitor its progress in real-time. 

Make sure you’re measuring your activities and their results at regular intervals, and follow a standardized process for tracking and analyzing data.

Tip: Ensure you have the right tools in place to ensure growth with our free blueprint below.

Following are 10 of the most effective and common business growth strategies. 

1. Market Penetration

A market penetration strategy is designed to help your organization increase its market share. The goal is to sell more of an existing product in an existing market.

One way to achieve a market penetration strategy is by lowering prices or offering promotions and discounts. 

Market penetration is a particularly effective strategy for SMB businesses because it is low-risk. 

Other effective tactics in a market penetration strategy include:

• Discounts for bulk/volume purchases
• Increase the number of distributors/dealers you work with 
• Offer free trials
• Direct marketing 

The bottom line is to sell more of your product in your existing market. In a market penetration strategy, the company is aiming to reach the maximum number of customers in the market until it becomes saturated.

2. Market Development

A market development strategy is all about selling existing products to new markets. This business growth strategy is aimed at growing the customer base. It works well for companies who are still working to find their position in a strong existing market. 

Market development relies on astute and thorough market research. Succeeding with this strategy is about more than just beating out your direct competitors. You may need to explore new geography, new customer segments, or new channels. Franchising is also a good option for certain industries.

Market development can be very lucrative; most companies achieve the most profitable growth when they’re able to move into an adjacent target market.

3. Product Expansion 

A product expansion business growth strategy relies on the creation of new products and services. These new offerings help your organization increase their market share. 

Many teams get creative with a product expansion strategy. It doesn’t always mean that you need to create brand-new products. You could also add updates to existing products, or add new varieties. You could also create bundles of existing products. 

Market research and marketing strategy analysis will help you determine the market needs and how you can most effectively tweak your offerings to meet those needs. 

4. Acquisition

Most people are very familiar with acquisitions. An acquisition is a business occurrence in which one company purchases another company. 

Acquisitions are sometimes lumped together with mergers, but the two are actually slightly different concepts. In an acquisition, one company takes over another one. In a merger, two companies join together. 

Acquisitions can be extremely profitable, but they require a lot of capital upfront, healthy cash flow, and significant debt capacity. For those reasons, acquisitions are usually completed by mature companies. 

If your organization can manage the expenses, though, they’re a great business growth strategy. Acquisitions reduce competition, give you access to proprietary technology, and expand your customer base.

5. Alternative Channels

One cost-effective business growth strategy is marketing on alternative channels. 

This strategy allows you to potentially reach new markets without creating any product changes. Exploring alternative channels is a very popular business growth strategy for small businesses who are just getting off the ground.

Consider the following alternative channels as you grow your business: 

• Website presence
• Yelp business page
• New platforms for sales, like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy
• Paid search ads
• Wholesalers
• Email marketing
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram)
• Business blog 

Omnichannel marketing is growing in popularity and is a very effective way to meet sales goals in the 21st century.

6. Strategic Partnerships

In a strategic partnership, two companies join forces for mutual benefit, while each still maintaining their own brand identity and operations. 

Partnerships allow each company to access the other’s customer base. It also allows for the shared use of critical resources like manpower, equipment, and technology. 

Because there’s less at stake, partnerships are more common than mergers or acquisitions.

7. Market Segmentation

With a market segmentation growth strategy, sales and marketing teams work to carefully segment their markets based on factors such as geography, demographics, or buying preferences. 

This highly-targeted segmentation allows sales teams to focus on and specialize in segments that are less explored than others already served by the competition. 

8. Organic Growth

The most ideal business growth strategy is known as organic growth. 

Organic growth requires little to no advertising, mergers, or acquisitions, and instead represents an optimized set of conditions that allow your marketing campaigns and products to reach many parts of your target audience without much effort on your part. 

9. Diversification

This type of business growth strategy can be risky, but also has a high return when executed correctly. 

Diversification means that sales teams sell either new products, or sell to new markets — or, in some cases, both. 

• Horizontal diversification: sales reps sell a new product to the current market.
• Vertical diversification: a business starts competing with its suppliers or customers. 
• Concentric diversification: a company creates a new product that’s similar to an existing product.
• Conglomerate diversification:  sales reps sell new products to new audiences.

Diversification requires a lot of capital and has the highest risk of failure out of all of the business growth strategies outlined in this article.

10. Cost Reduction

A cost reduction business growth strategy relies on organizations to reduce their operating costs. This frees up cash for reinvestment into growth opportunities and improves your overall bottom line.

Here are some strategies for implementing a cost reduction strategy: 

• Use accounting software to reduce or eliminate errors
• Go paperless
• Consider automation and/or outsourcing where possible
• Reduce traditional advertising methods and go digital instead

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to business growth strategies. You may find that several could fit the needs of your team, or that your needs change over time. It’s perfectly okay to use a variety of strategies over time — or even simultaneously.

Every brand with even an inkling of name recognition has successfully used a business growth strategy. Here’s a look at how some of the world’s most well-known companies have used popular business growth strategies to succeed.

Market Penetration: Facebook

When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, he shared the platform with only his fellow Harvard students. He later opened it up to Stanford, Yale, and Columbia. Later, again, he went on to share it among all the Ivy League schools, and some select Boston ones as well.

This is a perfect example of market penetration. Zuckerberg took his existing product and maximized the number of customers he “sold” it to within his market.

Strategic Partnership: Lyft & Taco Bell

Lyft & Taco Bell joined forces for one of the most memorable (and delicious) strategic partnerships in pop culture history. 

During the partnership, Lyft offered riders free access to “Taco Mode,” during which passengers could make a pit stop at Taco Bell on the way to their destination. This drove sales up for Taco Bell, and drew hungry customers away from competitor Uber and into the backseat of a Lyft.

Diversification: Amazon

It’s a well-known fact that the online retailer Amazon started as a books-only e-commerce platform. 

Over time, the company expanded to sell toys, DVDs, music, furniture, and — eventually — just about anything you could ever want. 

This is a textbook example of a diversification business growth strategy.

Here are some of our best tips for business growth in 2023. 

Carefully Consider and Combine Strategies

There are many more than the ten business growth strategies outlined here in this article, and each one has advantages and drawbacks. 

Take time — and even trial and error — discover which meets the needs of your specific business goals at any given time. 

In many cases, it’s also appropriate to use more than one business growth strategy at the same time. 

Understand Your Brand Identity 

In order for your business to grow, you need to have a very nuanced and thorough understanding of your brand, its identity, and its position in the market. 

Your business’s strengths, differentiating factors, unique selling points (USPs) , and core competencies will all help your business grow in a sustainable way.

Be Ready to Pivot

Successful and scalable business growth requires flexibility. 

Business growth strategies are great because they help sales and marketing teams stick to a plan, but they also allow teams to monitor progress and adapt strategies as needed. 

The most successful businesses are the ones that keep a careful pulse on their business progress and are ready to make changes as needed. 

Automate Everything 

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Prepare a business plan for growth

Planning is key to any business throughout its existence. Every successful business regularly reviews its business plan to ensure it continues to meet its needs. It's sensible to review current performance on a regular basis and identify the most likely strategies for growth.

Once you've reviewed your progress and identified the key growth areas that you want to target, it's time to revisit your business plan and make it a road map to the next stages for your business.

This guide will show how you can turn your business plan from a static document into a dynamic template that will help your business both survive and thrive.

The importance of ongoing business planning

What your business plan should include, drawing up a more sophisticated business plan, plan and allocate resources effectively, use targets to implement your business plan, when and how to review your business plan.

Most potential investors will want to see a business plan before they consider funding your business. Although many businesses are tempted to use their business plans solely for this purpose, a good plan should set the course of a business over its lifespan.

A business plan plays a key role in allocating resources throughout a business. It is a tool that can help you attract new funds or that you can use as a strategy document. A good business plan reveals how you would use the bank loan or investment you are asking for.

Ongoing business planning means that you can monitor whether you are achieving your business objectives . A business plan can be used as a tool to identify where you are now and in which direction you wish your business to grow. A business plan will also ensure that you meet certain key targets and manage business priorities.

You can maximise your chances of success by adopting a continuous and regular business planning cycle that keeps the plan up-to-date. This should include regular business planning meetings which involve key people from the business.

To find out more, see our guides on how to review your business performance and how to assess your options for growth .

If you regularly assess your performance against the plans and targets you have set, you are more likely to meet your objectives. It can also signpost where and why you're going astray. Many businesses choose to assess progress every three or six months.

The assessment will also help you in discussions with banks, investors and even potential buyers of your business. Regular review is a good vehicle for showing direction and commitment to employees, customers and suppliers.

Defining your business' purpose in your business plan keeps you focused, inspires your employees and attracts customers.

Your business plan should include a summary of what your business does, how it has developed and where you want it to go. In particular, it should cover your strategy for improving your existing sales and processes to achieve the growth you desire.

You also need to make it clear what timeframe the business plan covers - this will typically be for the next 12 to 24 months.

The plan needs to include:

• The marketing aims and objectives , for example how many new customers you want to gain and the anticipated size of your customer base at the end of the period. To find out about marketing strategy, see our guide on how to create your marketing strategy .
• Operational information such as where your business is based, who your suppliers are and the premises and equipment needed.
• Financial information , including profit and loss forecasts, cash flow forecasts, sales forecasts and audited accounts.
• A summary of the business objectives, including targets and dates.
• If yours is an owner-managed business, you may wish to include an exit plan . This includes planning the timing of your departure and the circumstances, e.g. family succession, sale of the business, floating your business or closing it down.

If you intend to present your business plan to an external audience such as investors or banks, you will also need to include:

• your aims and objectives for each area of the business
• details of the history of the business, including financial records from the last three years - if this isn't possible, provide details about trading to date
• the skills and qualifications of the management involved in your business
• information about the product or service, its distinctiveness and where it fits into the marketplace

If your business has grown to encompass a series of departments or divisions, each with its own targets and objectives, you may need to draw up a more sophisticated business plan.

The individual business plans of the departments and separate business units will need to be integrated into a single strategy document for the entire organisation.

This can be a complex exercise but it's vital if each business unit is to tread a consistent path and not conflict with the overall strategy.

This is not just an issue for large enterprises - many small firms consist of separate business units pursuing different strategies.

To draw up a business plan that marries all the separate units of an organisation requires a degree of co-ordination. It may seem obvious, but make sure all departments are using the same planning template.

Objectives for individual departments

It's important for each department to feel that they are a stakeholder in the plan. Typically, each department head will draft the unit's business plan and then agree on its final form in conjunction with other departments.

Each unit's budgets and priorities must be set so that they fit in with those of the entire organisation. Generally, individual unit plans are required to be more specific and precisely defined than the overall business plan. It's important that the objectives set for business units are realistic and deliverable. However complex it turns out to be, the individual business unit plan needs to be easily understood by the people whose job it is to make it work. They also need to be clear on how their plan fits in with that of the wider organisation.

The business plan plays a key role in allocating resources throughout a business so that the objectives set in the plan can be met.

Once you've reviewed your progress to date and identified your strategy for growth, your existing business plan may look dated and may no longer reflect your business' position and future direction.

When you are reviewing your business plan to cover the next stages, it's important to be clear on how you will allocate your resources to make your strategy work.

For example, if a particular business unit or department has been given a target, the business plan should allocate sufficient resources to achieve it. These resources may already be available within the business or may be generated by future activity.

In practice this could mean recruiting more office staff, spending more on marketing or buying more supplies or equipment. You may want to provide funds through current cash flow, generating more profit or seeking external funding. In general, it is always better to fund future growth through revenue generation.

However, you should do some precise budgeting to decide on the right level of resourcing for a particular unit or department. It's important that resources are prioritised, so that areas of a business which are key to delivering the overall aims and objectives are adequately funded. If funding isn't available this may involve making cutbacks in other areas.

A successful business plan should incorporate a set of targets and objectives.

While the overall plan may set strategic goals, these are unlikely to be achieved unless you use SMART objectives or targets, i.e. S pecific, M easurable, A chievable, R ealistic and T imely.

Targets help everyone within a business understand what they need to achieve and when they need to achieve it.

You can monitor the performance of employees, teams or a new product or service by using appropriate performance indicators . These can be:

• sales or profit figures over a given period
• milestones in new product development
• productivity benchmarks for individual team members
• market-share statistics

Targets make it clearer for individual employees to see where they fit within an organisation and what they need to do to help the business meet its objectives. Setting clear objectives and targets and closely monitoring their delivery can make the development of your business more effective. Targets and objectives should also form a key part of employee appraisals, as a means of objectively addressing individuals' progress.

Once you've drawn up your new business plan and put it into practice, it needs to be continually monitored to make sure the objectives are being achieved. This review process should follow an assessment of your progress to date and an analysis of the most promising ways to develop your business. To find out more about these stages see our guides on how to review your business performance and how to assess your options for growth .

This process is called the business plan cycle . In some businesses, the cycle may be a continuous process with the plan being regularly updated and monitored. For most businesses, an annual plan - broken down into four quarterly operating plans - is sufficient. However, if a business is heavily sales driven, it can make more sense to have a monthly operating plan, supplemented where necessary with weekly targets and reviews.

It's important to keep in mind that major events in your business' target marketplace (e.g. competitor consolidation, acquisition of a major customer) or in the broader environment (e.g. new legislation) should trigger a review of your strategic objectives.

Regardless of whether or not there are fixed time intervals in your business plan, it must be part of a rolling process, with regular assessment of performance against the plan and agreement of a revised forecast if necessary.

Original document, Prepare a business plan for growth , © Crown copyright 2009 Source: Business Link UK (now GOV.UK/Business ) Adapted for Québec by Info entrepreneurs

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17th February, 2022

Strategic growth planning: How to get it right in your business

Businesses use strategic growth plans to guide their increase in market share sustainably. Here’s how you can create and refine your own.

Ambitious business owners are often driven by a growth mindset when it comes to building a successful venture.

In the early stages of a business, the focus tends to be about product development and product-market fit. While getting that process right requires a significant time and financial investment, once the product is functioning well and the optimal market is identified, the next inevitable step would be expansion.

Reaching this phase of growth is an exciting milestone because it demonstrates that the business model has potential. As exciting as it is though, it can be a very difficult process to manage – which is why strategic growth plans are important.

What is a strategic growth plan?

A strategic growth plan is a blueprint that businesses create to map out a feasible pathway for them to increase their market share.

In other words, these plans provide a critical analysis of various business considerations and potential challenges or roadblocks, and put forward a framework through which sustainable business growth and expansion can occur.

For example, if a business is looking to increase its market share through selling its product in a new geographic market, a quality strategic growth plan will guide the expansion process step by step – taking into account any and all product or industry related challenges that the proposed growth may present.

3 common growth challenges

While business growth can present a plethora of challenges, there are three roadblocks in particular that tend to present themselves across all business types and industries.

1. Loss of quality

Whether it’s a service-based or product-based business, growth means more work to deliver on.

When delivery at scale is not managed correctly, it is almost inevitable the quality that was kept when operations were smaller will drop significantly.

Strategies need to be put in place to maintain quality control levels while ramping things up.

READ: 5 strategies for managing business growth

2. Compromised company culture

Company growth will almost always mean an increase in employee headcount, or at least a redeployment of existing resources into other areas that enable the growth to occur.

When either of these scenarios occur, it becomes very difficult to foster a workplace culture that prioritises the health and wellbeing of employees, holds strong to its values, and encourages teamwork and comradery – which can lead to detrimental business outcomes across the board.

Processes need to be created to ensure that company culture remains prioritised during a business’s growth phase.

3. Cashflow woes

Expanding a business is almost always an expensive process that requires far more access to cashflow than normal. Without the appropriate planning and consideration, growth strongly impact a company’s ability to fund its ongoing operations – potentially jeopardising the entire business.

Strategic Growth Plans need to be designed to form a growth path that addresses each of these issues, as well as any others that can potentially arise throughout the journey into expansion.

Taking your industry into consideration

Outside of the general issues that can occur as a result of growth, there are also industry-specific considerations that need to be taken into account as businesses seek to increase their market share.

Whether they be regulatory, population, climate, or market-related considerations, no stone can be left unturned when planning for expansion.

Take Google for example. As the company continues to expand its suite of products and services into different jurisdictions, it always needs to consider laws of each location and how they may impact its ability to deliver a particular service.

To deal with this, Google has an in-house group of economists, lawyers and product specialists who are constantly navigating these considerations to ensure sustainable business expansion – a strategy which was likely developed within one of their own strategic growth plans.

Of course, not every organisation will have access to a team of full-time experts like Google, but this should serve as a reminder to engage closely with your financial advisors, accountants and bookkeepers (as well as other relevant stakeholders) when developing your plans.

The top 3 benefits of a quality growth plan

An effective plan to manage business growth can be beneficial in so many ways. For instance:

1. It sets a definitive agenda for your business and its leaders

A quality strategic growth plan will pre-empt the entire expansion journey, and provide key stakeholders with unique insight into what to expect throughout the process, and formulate extensive protocols for each step along the way.

2. Its success is measurable and can be adapted on-the-go

Given that most solid growth plans will be comprised of several key milestones, businesses that use these plans can track their progress as they meet these milestones, equipping them with all the data they need to make informed decisions in other areas of the business.

3. Contingency and risk planning becomes clearer

Critically analysing the potential risks on a granular level also allows businesses to calculate risk probability and develop a series of contingency plans that can be triggered if certain events that were considered during the planning process end of taking place.

4 strategies used in successful growth plans

Some of the world’s largest companies have navigated significant growth phases through the use of carefully formulated growth strategies that have proven to be effective.

These growth strategies can be summarised into four key categories:

1. Marketing strategy

These strategies are typically used by those businesses who are looking to increase their market share by tapping into more people within the demographic in which they have found a solid product-market fit. Tactics like launching a new marketing campaign, adjusting pricing, incentivising existing users to share the product with their networks all fall under this banner.

LinkedIn has always been a strong adopter of the ‘market strategy’ for its own growth – especially in its early days. It always encouraged people to invite all of their contacts to join the professional network through the use of email campaigns and UX strategies as a way to increase its market share.

2. Development strategy

The strategy for expanding a business through taking the existing product and offering it to a new target market is often referred to as the ‘development’ strategy.

Looking into a new geographic location is a common form of ‘development’, as has been done successfully by many large businesses, including Deliveroo, who created an on-demand food delivery product in England, and expanded their business model to many other locations around the world.

3. Product strategy

This strategy is essentially the inverse of ‘development strategy’, where the company expands through offering a new product to its existing target market.

A great example of this growth strategy being deployed successfully can be seen in Uber’s launch of Uber Eats. After successfully capturing a set of customers for its ridesharing services, Uber promoted a new food-delivery service to those same customers.

4. Diversification

This method of growth is a major pivot from the rest, as it seeks to expand through the development of a new product for a new market. Diversification relies on a stellar brand reputation that stems far beyond the existing products or target markets.

Amazon successfully adopted this growth strategy, taking on an endless number of totally unrelated services, and leveraging its name to get them off the ground.

Developing a strategic growth plan in 4 steps

When developing your own strategic growth plan, there are four key steps to follow to ensure that the plan can be used for healthy business growth:

1. Clearly define your goals

The biggest mistake a business can make when formulating a growth strategy is set out to grow the business in too many ways.

Identify your goals, and set very limited timeframes to achieve them. Put forward bite-sized milestones and follow your plan diligently. With a clear set of goals, the right strategies can be leveraged and used to their full potential.

2. Identify key personnel

Each strategic growth plan will require the involvement of different people on your team, and it’s important to know who those people are and include them in the planning process.

If the strategy is product focused, you will need to round up the product development troops, and if the plan is to shift target markets, your people relations and marketing specialists will need to rise to the challenge.

3. Make sure you choose appropriate tactics

A fundamental component of any working strategic growth plan is the tactics that are put forward as ways to achieve the end result.

Make sure to conduct adequate research into the best possible tactic to be used to achieve the intended outcome.

For instance, if you intend on using a marketing strategy for your expansion, consider the type of campaign that will yield the best results.

4. Steps must be actionable and KPIs achievable

KPIs are a key tool in guiding a business through the steps of its growth strategy. Each step within the plan needs to be actionable without unforeseen obstacles, and the KPIs need to be met within a timely manner.

Simple and steady wins the race

Expansion is an important part of running a business, and strategic growth plans are all about creating a framework for sustainable growth. They anticipate challenges, provide a critical analysis of circumstances, and allow for a certain level of comfort in risk taking.

By choosing a well-thought-out pathway of growing your business, not only are you more likely to experience greater levels of business success, but the people you impact along the way will be better off for it as well.

Along with implementing a strategic growth plan, Australian operators can find out how a cloud business management platform can support your growing business here , while New Zealand leaders can click through here .

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Writing a Business Plan: Choosing a Growth Strategy

After launch, what's going to be your growth strategy?

Potential investors who read your business plan will want to know about your growth strategy—how you plan to grow your business once it's launched and off the ground.

Your growth strategy entails more than just demonstrating how your revenue will grow. This section of your business plan is about proving to others that you have a plan for bringing your product to new customers and new markets, and perhaps even introducing new products.

The obvious objective in outlining your growth strategy is to show how these moves will increase sales. This can happen in a number of ways.

Multiple Locations

If your business requires a retail presence, outline where you might seek to open additional shops and what your geographic strategy will be. Don’t assume you can go national just because your product is regionally successful.

New Client Acquisition

Once you’ve reached your original core customers, who else might be interested in your products? If you’re a business-to-consumer company, think about offering business-to-business services, and vice-versa. Office supply stores, for example, have been very successful at catering to the needs of individuals as well as small-business owners.

New Products 

New products are an obvious way to grow sales, but their issuance often is poorly executed. Discuss your plan for introducing new products or services in the short, medium and long-term. These can be variations of your core product or completely new offerings that expand your overall base.

Franchising 

Restaurants often turn to franchising, and it is a feasible option for many other industries as well. Franchising works best when your product is consistent and customers have certain expectations about your brand.

Online Expansion

How will you use the internet to grow your sales? Will you sell your product on your own corporate website, partner with an existing internet retailer or maybe advertise online to build local brand awareness? Using the web is not mandatory for selling your product, but your growth strategy should include an online element.

Creative Marketing

Look back at the marketing section of your business plan. If you’ve already addressed facets of your business growth strategy in that section, you can use it to detail your expansion, and then refer to your marketing section as an implementation tool.

Decreasing Costs

Growth has bottom-line advantages, too. The more business you do, the more you can take advantage of learning curves and economies of scale. Learning curves allow you to become more efficient as you gain experience. Economies of scale refer to a reduction in average cost over time because of factors such as buying power and managerial specialization.

Acquisitions

A final option to address is growth through acquisition. This would come into play after your startup is more established and ready to expand into other markets. At this stage, you may want to address which companies, or types of companies, would make ideal acquisition targets. Look for companies that are a good fit for your product and distribution methods, but that also present new opportunities for growth. Any duplication from an acquisition should be balanced out with growth areas.

8 Growth Strategies for the Modern Business Landscape

Nov 3, 2023 | Read time: 10 min.

RJ Licata , Sr. Director of Marketing

• A growth strategy is an action plan for a business to increase sales, revenue, or customers.
• Choose business growth strategies that align with your budget, goals, timelines, competition, and desired market share.
• The most effective growth strategies align with brand positioning, possess deep audience insight, and are diversified to reduce risk and maximize market share expansion.

Contents Jump to

In a business landscape where consumer preferences and behavior are constantly changing alongside technology, the significance of a growth strategy cannot be overstated. 

It’s the blueprint for success, the guiding force that propels businesses forward, and the key to thriving in a fiercely competitive market.

In this article, we’ll define what growth strategy means, discuss different types of strategies, and how to build one. We’ll also explore the transformative power an integrated approach holds in the pursuit of business excellence.

Why growth strategy matters

Put simply, a growth strategy is a well-defined plan or set of tactics for achieving expansion and increased success. It outlines how a business intends to grow in terms of revenue, market share, customer base, or geographical locations. 

MARKETING TERM DEFINITION Growth Strategy A well-defined plan or set of tactics for achieving expansion and increased success

Growth strategies encompass various approaches, such as market penetration, product development, market development, diversification, mergers and acquisitions, and more, depending on the specific goals and circumstances of the business. These strategies are critical for a company’s long-term viability and competitiveness.

To remain relevant and adaptive, large brands must continuously seek new avenues for growth, innovation, and market expansion. A robust growth strategy enables businesses to navigate these changes effectively.

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Types of business growth strategies

At a high level, there is organic business growth and inorganic. Organic growth means expanding naturally through internal efforts, like increasing sales, launching new products, or entering new markets, without relying on mergers or acquisitions. 

It’s self-driven growth from within the company, and it’s considered more stable and sustainable than inorganic growth that happens through external means.

The four most common and well-known growth strategies align with the Ansoff-Matrix: market penetration, product development, market development, and diversification. But with the expanding digital landscape and changes in consumer behavior , brands have more opportunities to diversify their approach, grow their footprint, and get in front of customers in more impactful ways. 

Here’s a closer look at 8 different types.

1. Market development (expansion)

Market development, or market expansion, is a growth strategy where you sell existing products to new, untapped markets. This strategy helps you broaden your market share beyond your current customer base. 

It might involve targeting different industries, demographics, corporate departments, or geographic areas. Successful companies often find the most profitable growth by expanding into adjacent markets. 

Uber’s global expansion is a prime example. They started in the United States and expanded internationally, adapting their services to local needs and regulations. This move extended their customer base and global presence, contributing to their significant growth as a transportation platform. 

To succeed in a new market, it’s essential to understand the entire competitive landscape, including non-direct competitors and key decision-makers.

2. Market penetration

Market penetration, on the other hand, aims to increase a company’s market share and sales within an existing market or customer base. This strategy typically involves selling more of the company’s existing products or services to its current customers or targeting similar customers who have not yet used the company’s offerings.

Amazon’s expansion of its Amazon Prime service is one example of market penetration. Amazon already had a large customer base, but they wanted to increase customer loyalty and sales within that existing customer pool.

Amazon introduced various enhancements to its Prime service, including faster delivery options, expanded streaming content, and exclusive deals. These options aimed to attract new customers while also encouraging current Prime members to use the service more frequently.

As a result, Amazon increased its market penetration by making the Prime service more attractive to a broader range of consumers.

Interested in assessing your current market position or exploring a new one? See where you stand today .

3. Market disruption

Market disruption involves entering a well-established industry that is usually dominated by a few legacy brands and proceeding to do things completely differently than everyone else. There are many ways you can potentially disrupt a market, including:

• Using a completely different business model, as many direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have done.
• Utilizing innovations, such as when Salesforce offered a cloud-based CRM.
• Offering significantly cheaper or better quality products.
• Providing something new, such as Slack replacing traditional email.

Think of how Dollar Shave Club disrupted the male razor market with a DTC model. In a sign of capitulation, Unilever acquired them roughly five years later for $1 billion.

4. Product expansion or diversification

Developing new products or adding new features to existing ones can be a highly effective business growth strategy. Product development opens your brand up to new audiences who weren’t interested in your brand before.

Semrush is an example of a company that started with a rudimentary SEO and paid search platform.

The company launched new features over the years, and it’s now a comprehensive software suite. Although the target audience never changed, new functionalities appealed to a wider segment of that audience.

This business growth strategy worked well for Semrush which has a current market capitalization of more than $2.7 billion.

5. Owned asset optimization

Owned asset optimization (OAO) is an emerging approach to growth strategy that aims to harmonize a company’s various brand and marketing efforts around common business goals.

In OAO, a brand’s content and other marketing materials are viewed as business assets with potentially untapped value. These assets are then optimized and strategically leveraged to build brand equity and generate consistent, predictable revenue streams.

This approach creates a synergistic relationship between branding and revenue generation , ensuring that marketing efforts not only drive engagement but also contribute directly to the bottom line.

Owned Asset Optimization (OAO) | The Foundational Guide

6. new channels.

New distribution channels rank among the top 10 business strategies for growth because they propel revenue growth without any product changes. Ecommerce businesses like Allbirds have increased revenue by also growing their brick-and-mortar presence. Whereas Allbirds was exclusively online in the beginning, they currently boast 29 real-world stores.

Sometimes, one company’s identification of a new distribution channel can trigger a tsunami of change throughout the industry. Take Salesforce. They introduced the idea of cloud-based, subscription software in an industry dominated by large, expensive, complex enterprise software requiring an army of professional service reps to get it to work.

Salesforce went on to grow rapidly, and today it’s a $21 billion+ entity. The software industry transformed, and today is filled with other SaaS offerings.

7. Strategic partnerships

Strategic partnerships with other brands can generate growth that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. For example, if you partner with a company that offers a product or service that complements yours, you get access to their audience, and vice-versa. You also receive referrals from your strategic partner and benefit from the goodwill built up around their brand.

An example of a strategic partnership that worked well is the one between Lyft and Taco Bell. Lyft offered Taco Bell delivery service to its customers, in which a Lyft passenger could request a mid-trip stop at a local Taco Bell (“Taco Mode”) with a simple tap within the Lyft app. The partnership led to free publicity for both companies and an increase in sales for Taco Bell.

Strategic partnerships can also focus on an improved or unique product. Once again, looking at Taco Bell, a partnership with Doritos resulted in the creation of the Doritos Locos Taco. To say it was a massive hit is an understatement. Within the first 18 months of the new product launch, Doritos Locos Taco sales surpassed $1 billion.

8. Acquisitions

Acquisitions are one of the most straightforward and effective paths to business growth. They typically become a viable strategy for companies with substantial cash flow and debt capacity at their disposal.

Acquisitions offer a range of advantages. They enable businesses to:

• Reduce competition by acquiring direct competitors.
• Gain access to proprietary technology that would be time-consuming and costly to develop in-house.
• Tap into the customer base of the acquired company.

A prominent example of successful business growth through acquisitions is Salesforce. In 2020, Salesforce acquired Slack Technologies, a prominent business communication platform. This acquisition allowed Salesforce to diversify its services beyond customer relationship management (CRM) into workplace collaboration and communication. 

The goal was to create an integrated platform for businesses and merge customer data with communication tools. This underscored the trend of companies broadening their service offerings through strategic acquisitions to provide more comprehensive solutions to their customers.

How to build a successful growth strategy

So, how do you execute a successful business growth strategy? A comprehensive growth strategy encompasses all aspects of your brand, including digital marketing, brand identity, positioning, and customer experience. Here are the key steps that ensure your growth strategy is set up for success.

Know your brand

First and foremost, you need a clear understanding of your brand identity and strengths. Identify your core competencies, positioning, and differentiation. Consider Walmart, for instance, which achieved remarkable growth by delivering the lowest prices for its customers.

Conduct market and audience research

No matter which growth strategies you implement, start with market research. Research gives you insight into your current customers as well as potential new business from untapped markets. This step reveals trends, growth opportunities, and potential barriers to entry that could limit your success in a new market.

Audience research helps you tap into new areas of your current market, as well as new audience segments that could benefit from your offerings. You’ll uncover valuable insights about buying behavior and product preferences in addition to the channels they use most frequently along their journey .

Competitive research highlights your positioning relative to competitors in your current market. It also identifies market share leaders in new areas so you can assess their vulnerabilities and capitalize on opportunities.

Establish goals

Once you have a clear understanding of your current market as well as where you want to grow (new markets or existing markets), you can then establish specific growth goals. Goals are key to any growth strategy because they drive the actions that lead to success.

All growth goals should be measurable, and quantitative goals should be time-bound with deadlines.

By establishing clear goals, you can measure your success and optimize your activities over time. You can adjust your strategy as necessary to ensure the achievement of your growth objectives.

Determine your growth strategy

After you set growth goals, decide which growth strategy you’ll implement to acquire new customers and achieve your goals.

Will you target organic growth, or use an acquisition strategy? Alternatively, you might combine several strategies to achieve your goals. It’s more complex to implement multiple business growth strategies, but it’s certainly a method to maximize your results.

The strategy or strategies you choose will depend on a variety of factors, including your budget, goals, opportunities, competition, timelines, and calculated market share targets.

Create your implementation plan

Your execution plan contains the nitty-gritty details of your growth strategy. It’s the concrete actions you’re going to take to make your growth strategy a reality. For example, if you’re going to use acquisitions as a growth strategy, define the specific gaps you’re aiming to fill or the new audience segments you’re trying to capture.

Don’t be vague with your execution plan. Spell out all the details of your growth strategy so that you and your team members know what needs to be executed, when it needs to be done, and how it will be achieved.

All of this planning creates accountability and helps ensure that you hit your intended growth goals more reliably.

Measure results and optimize for what works

Once you have established your growth strategy and have started executing it, regularly measure the key metrics that indicate your performance. The metrics you choose should be closely tied to your overall growth goals, not vanity metrics with no real-world bearing on actual results.

The more you monitor and measure your growth efforts, the more you’ll begin to see which parts of your execution plan are producing results and which aren’t. If something is working particularly well, double down on it. If a particular tactic isn’t effective, don’t be afraid to pivot.

Continually optimize the activities of your business growth strategies, and you’re bound to come out ahead in the end.

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The power of an integrated approach to growth

Even though you’re making serious investments with any business growth strategy, there needs to be elements of flexibility in your approach. The power of an integrated growth strategy in the modern business landscape lies in its ability to harness the collective strength and flexibility of diverse approaches to drive sustainable success.

By combining market development, disruption, diversification, channel expansion, strategic partnerships, acquisitions, and emerging approaches like OAO, businesses can adapt to changing landscapes, and seize opportunities while mitigating risks.

This synergy fosters a holistic, future-focused approach that propels companies toward expansion. The most resilient, legacy-building brands are those that weave these strategies into a dynamic program, creating a roadmap for sustained growth.

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CEOs, Is Your Business Strategy Bold Enough?

In a global survey, 45% of CEOs said they don’t think their companies would survive more than a decade on their current path.

There has never been a more difficult time to be a CEO — the urgency for bold and transformative leadership echoes louder than ever. In an environment where the stakes are high and the competitive landscape is rapidly evolving, complacency is a risk few can afford. In PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO Survey, 45% of CEOs said they do not believe their companies would survive more than a decade if they remain on their current path. This means that a large number of companies are possibly at risk of being lapped by competitors or disruptors. CEOs need to better understand whether their strategy is bold enough to position them for future growth. This article covers four actions that CEOs should be taking now. Business model reinvention demands courage, but with the right team willing to make bold moves, you can propel your company to new and unimagined heights.

Not long ago, I had a difficult conversation with a CEO whom I also consider to be a friend. He operates in a highly competitive industry and shared how proud he was of his strategic agenda and how hard his team was pushing to bring their strategy to life. The team was fatigued, but energized by the progress they were seeing. In many ways, this CEO was right to be proud, as his company was doing well in several important areas. However, in observing other companies, including his competitors, and spending time with his organization, we knew they were falling behind in growth, efficiency, scalability, and regulatory positioning. I took the opportunity to both acknowledge what I thought was working well and share the harder message that we believed they were falling behind. Needless to say, it was a challenging conversation.

• Tim Ryan is the U.S. senior partner of PwC and the founder of the Trust Leadership Institute , an initiative that convenes a diverse community of executives to explore the evolving world, navigate its complexities, and embrace new opportunities with trust.

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China needs a new economic plan that focuses less on exporting and more on domestic growth, 'Dr. Doom' Nouriel Roubini says

• China will stagnate if it relies on manufacturing and exports to grow, Nouriel Roubini wrote in Project Syndicate.
• That growth model is outdated and worked in a time when foreign markets were more open to Chinese products.
• Beijing must instead stimulate domestic demand and service-led GDP growth, the famed "Dr. Doom" economist said.

China can't grow out of its economic problems if it stays focused on manufacturing and exports, says famed "Dr. Doom" economist Nouriel Roubini . Though this strategy sparked decades of impressive growth, it could now put China on course for stagnation, he warned on Thursday.

"The old Chinese growth model is broken," the perma-bear economist wrote for Project Syndicate , later adding: "China therefore needs a new growth model concentrated on domestic services — rather than goods — and private consumption." 

His pushback comes as Beijing increasingly focuses on advanced manufacturing, boosting exports of products such as electric vehicles and solar panels .

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When China's economy was smaller, this form of growth made sense, as its exports were still manageable for foreign markets, Roubini said. 

But with geopolitical tensions now rising, protectionism is starting to hamper the world's appetite for Chinese products, and could leave the country stranded with excess supply, he warned. 

"Now that it is the world's second-largest economy, any dumping of its excess capacity will be met by even more draconian tariffs and protectionism targeting Chinese goods," he said. Other analysts have evened warned this could spark a trade war as soon as next year . 

To avoid this and still generate growth, Beijing must instead invest in domestic demand, allowing services to take on a greater share of GDP, Roubini said. 

His concerns are well-cited, as analysts have long pointed out China's low household consumption rates as a worrying set back for growth.

"The situation demands larger pension benefits, greater health-care provision, unemployment insurance, permanent urban residency for rural migrant workers who currently lack access to public services, higher real (inflation-adjusted) wages, and measures to redistribute SOE profits to households so that they can spend more," Roubini wrote.

But Beijing's leadership looks unwilling to bolster private-sector and household confidence, something Roubini blames on President Xi Jinping, citing that he's surrounded himself by advisors sympathetic to the current growth model. 

Previously, economist Paul Krugman explained Xi's unwillingness to boost support for consumers and businesses due to a strong ideological dislike for for stimulus and welfare aid.

Watch: Protesters in China are trying to break out of quarantine

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