Strategic Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Growth: It's Not Just for Kids Anymore

In This Chapter

• Growing your business using current products and developing new ones

• Exploring and assessing new market potential

• Looking at various partnership strategies

• Finding out about growth through mergers and acquisitions

At the end of the day, what's every business trying to do? Grow. More customers, more sales, positive cash flow, larger deal sizes, higher volume, more billable hours, justification for higher prices, and so on. Ask any hard‐working entrepreneur what he or she is working on and you're bound to hear a comment related to growth. Growth is why you're in business — to build or create something bigger than yourselves. Because if you're not growing, you're shrinking.

With that said, you don't want to focus on growth for growth's sake because growth is just the means to an end. Your desire to grow must match up with your vision for your organization. Rapid growth, incremental growth, or maintaining your current position require specific strategies.

In this chapter, you discover the different paths for growth strategies. You understand how to travel in more than one direction to find partners and acquire others. Lastly, you look at how to evaluate the different growth strategies against each other to get a clear picture of your strategic choices.

Strategizing How to Grow

Successful growth stems from matching up your strengths and weaknesses with the opportunities that exist in your business environment. Your growth strategy ...