How to Find Growth: Business Planning Mentoring

 

The Key Role of Leader: Growth

The key role of every leader in any organisation is to determine the direction of where they are leading their organisation. A leaders success or failure is determined by what growth they achieve. You are leading yourself, your people, your shareholders, and your customers to where you want to go. All successful growth strategies set and work towards goals.

Leaders can often make sound and good decisions about things they can see and clearly understand. Often leaders, directors and owners have advice and support systems built into their day to day decision making, but when planning tomorrow's growth it is not always so easy. Many leaders struggle with looking and making decisions beyond the known horizon. It is hard to see beyond the tangible, beyond the concrete, beyond the known.

This is why I have created my Business planning Toolkit, built upon my 20 years of experience, to help you to learn how to successfully look and find growth opportunities and turn them into growth. My business planning toolkit will enable you to Take the guess work out of your business success.      

Leaders Need To Plan For Growth.

Leadership success is always about delivering tangible growth, where have you taken your business and why. Knowing that you need to find growth is one thing, but knowing how to find the right direction to take, where to look and find real growth or answer the hidden real challenge of being able to assess which growth options to follow and which to disregard is quite another. 

Here's a great example of getting it wrong. The CEO of LA Gear grew his company from $11 million to $820 million in sales in just four years by focusing on unique, fashionable shoes that were expertly marketed.

Then chasing three huge opportunities they killed the company stone dead. To keep growth coming LA Gear sold excess product at deep discounts which devalued the brand, invested heavily into basketball shoes, not their core market and offered low-end shoes at Wal-Mart.

How To Find Growth 

There can therefore be good growth and bad growth, how do you know which one to nail your colours to as a leader. Growth opportunities need to be assessed and verified. They need to be understood as part of a long term strategy, not a quick tactical grab which helped to end LA Gear.

So leaders need to develop clear strategies which support and drive long-term brand value, and not grab at passing opportunities just because they have some big short-term numbers attached to them.  Assessing where you are going against long-term key performance measures is one key way which all successful major companies use, the balanced scorecard.

Putting All The Steps Together      

These are just some of the key steps which take your business from a cold start to a roaring firebrand, going where you want to take your business. I've put together my Business Planning Mentoring to Take the guess work out of your business success that takes you step-by-step through the simple steps of how successful business leaders plan their business.  

How to take the guess work out of your success

This step-by-step process that takes you through each step that builds logically and effectively to your effective growth plan. Short videos take you effectively through each step, with plain English explanations supported by a thorough workbook with all the templates you need to take the guess work out of your business success. From finding growth to setting goals and monitoring your progress towards them.

Here's 5 benefits from following my Business Planning Mentoring Programme to find your growth:- 

1. Weekly and monthly support programmes - planned around your precise needs. 
2. Simple steps - which move you forward one step at a time, see the results happening
3. Robust processes used by successful leaders 
4. Workbooks and support action plan - fully explained with all templates to support your development  
5. My guidance to show you each step with key tips to avoid the pitfalls.

See the video which explains more, click: How to take the guess work out of your business success.

Strategy: out compete the competition

How to outcompete the competition

In mature often saturated markets developing a unique strategic position which gives you sustainable competitive advantage in your market is the holy grail for business owners. To be somewhere that your competitors aren't, and to have something that cannot be taken away is what everyone setting up in business dreams of achieving. It is one clear defining way of out competing the competition is to develop a sustainable competitive advantage in a market

Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Few companies can lay claim to that holy grail position for any length of time, here are some that come immediately to mind: Ferrari, Rolls Royce Engines, Hoover, Apple's Iphone and Ipod, Boeing, Walkman, Sky, Microsoft Windows, are all good examples of companies who have achieved, or are holding it today. 

Dyson: Model of Creating Market Leadership 

To be recognised as the market maker such as Hoover gave it unbelievable control of the market for most of the 20th century, not only owning the market it was even named after them. What changed? A loss of focus and desire to continue to own the market coupled with the airplane ticket fiasco which opened the door to new competitors and to one man in particular James Dyson  who grabbed the opportunity to replace Hoovers once held position in the market launching his own Dyson brand through technology shift of his cyclone bag less vacuum. 

His passion, created from vacuuming at home and becoming frustrated, seeing the cyclone idea at a sawmill which then took 15 years, 5,127 prototypes to turn into a winning product, which today benefits upon 60% recommendation purchases and has allowed Dyson to spin his cyclone technology into air dryers and washing machines. 

Features of Strategic Competitive Advantage 

What are the key features of sustainable competitive advantage for any company in their market, well here are the most commonly found top five:-

• Charge a premium for its services; even low cost suppliers out price other low cost suppliers.
• Lead the market by innovation; will get to market new ideas quicker or in a more dominant market shift way.
• Controls the key channels to market; from buying decision processes to pricing structures.
• Owns the pace of change within the market; from technology development and consumer shift
• Control of buyer activity; the significant majority of the share of buy (SOB) and share of space (SOS) through its dominance.   

To achieve sustainable competitive advantage is extremely difficult, most companies manage to reach a challenger market position. For that to happen their has to be a clear vision of where the company is going and where the market opportunity exists. For men like James Dyson the advantage was that he was in the right place at the right time, with the right product that enabled a technological shift in the market with his bag less vacuum.

If you want to develop your company's position then there needs to be a vision for it, where it is going and why. If your look for some advice on developing your company, its marketing, its sustainable competitive advantage then contact us at Cowden Consulting to see how we can assist you, or read more about us in this blog or at Cowden Consulting.

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