Are you Planning For Growth?

Are you Planning For Growth?

Over the past few years have you done very much long-range planning for growth?
If you are forward looking and flexible in your thinking, more than likely you will be continually planning and executing changes - for change is a dominant aspect of modern competitive life. Although a wise businessperson respects the past, they should never be bound by it. Your long-range planning should take into consideration all of the following: selling methods and sales training, sales promotion media and devices, customer services, addition of income bringing services, building modernization (fixtures and equipment), branch development or location change, financing (especially the reinvestment of earnings).

Do day-by-day activities involve you so much that you find no opportunity for advance planning?
The small business owner must be both a planner and a doer. Day-to-day activities can be delegated so that you can do more important planning.

When you find that change is called for, do you act decisively and creatively?
Risk is always present in business. Some of it can be reduced by insurance. But there is no way to hedge on long-range planning. Once you have decided to make a change - based on all available facts - you should enter into the project wholeheartedly.

Do you find that recurring crisis force you to make most of your changes before you have been able to give them thoughtful analysis?
The failure to plan for changes that must be made if you are to hold your customers and attract new ones leads to great waste and poor management practices. Sudden changes add unnecessarily to your expenses, they disturb your established customers, and they upset your employees' morale.

When you determine that you must make a change in some policy or practice, plan ahead carefully and give all those involved a clear account of what is going to be done. By planning ahead, you lessen the possibility of crises and the need for snap judgments.

Do you have someone ready to take your place in case of emergency?
The uncertainties of life are many. You should have someone ready to keep the business running smoothly, if something should happen to you, until such time as a long-range decision can be made.

Are you grooming someone to succeed you in the not too distant future?
No matter how young the management of a business is, unforeseen disabilities can occur at any time. Someone should always be in training as a successor; otherwise, the business is no more secure than the health of its owner-manager.