How to Create a Plan of Action to Grow Your Business

So often I have business owners approach me with ideas and thoughts about growing their business. Often, the problem is not the lack of ideas but where to start and which ones to start with. Sometimes, business owners are so overwhelmed with options (which is a good thing) that they do not know what to do with them. So to not get overwhelmed, it’s necessary to create a plan of action (POA)!

Here are three steps to help you create your own plan of action to grow your business:

How to Know if It’s Time to Expand Your Business

Thinking about expanding your business is a big deal for obvious reasons. If your clientele is growing and you need to move to a bigger space or increase the number of employees, you need to make sure that you’ll continue to operate efficiently and effectively. More importantly, you need to make sure that you don’t get ahead of yourself.

Growing is good, expanding without doing your research is bad. Is your business ready?

Look at the World Around You

In 2005, I had a client that wanted to expand. Business was booming and they were running out of space in their tiny warehouse. By 2007, they had purchased a building and started pouring money into the building and increasing inventory. Then 2008 happened, and the business closed two years later. From boom to bust in three years’ time. That is what can happen if you don’t look at the world around you.

Pay attention to the US and world economic factors. What affects other parts of the country or other industries can affect you as well. Kiplinger puts out economic outlooks and forecasts every year. If strictly looking at the numbers makes your head spin, Forbes usually has a lot of great commentary about indicators and forecasts.

Either way, keep researching until you find one that you can make sense of. These economic forecasts are done by experts, and while they can only make an educated guess on what all of this means, it can at least help you make some good decisions.

Why Collaboration as a Business Model Works

Over the past few months, I have had a myriad of discussions around the concept of collaboration. It has come in many different forms, ranging from finding the right clients to how to create a startup community in my city. Interestingly enough, I had three conversations in one week about how “helping each other” was a necessary and vital part of the small business community. Though, the last conversation blew my mind—not because what was discussed was so innovative or a part of the next technological revolution. It was because it was so simple, important, and the most often overlooked aspect in small business.

Collaboration as business model. I know, right? Your mind is blown too! Collaboration by definition is the act of working with someone to produce or create something. We do this all the time. But what if your business model was not just the result of collaboration, but the act of collaboration?

Shelly Rice is the premier collaborator. I had the opportunity to talk to her for an hour and a half, and I was impressed and overwhelmed at the same time. She made me wonder what I had been doing with my life all of this time! Here are just a few of the nuggets that she shared with me.