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A business strategy can save you a lot of hassle in the long run. Without a strategy in business, you run the risk of going into things blindly and not fully considering the consequences of your actions. For example, you want to grow your business by investing in new technology – this is great, but you need to consider how this will affect your staff (will they need training to handle the new machinery?), can you actually afford it etc. If you do need funding support for when you're developing growth strategies, get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub.
Developing the vision
In business, having a sense of direction can make your life a lot easier. If you’re interested in growing your business, whether it’s from creating a new product or taking on more employees, it’s good to get your thoughts down on paper, so that you can share with your team your goals and ensure everyone is on the same wavelength. Your staff are likely to be more motivated and efficient if they see there’s a point to their role and an overall purpose.
Creating a vision statement can help you to demonstrate your business’s values and support you with developing growth strategies. A vision statement doesn’t have to be long – one sentence would be enough. But you should:
- Explain where you see yourself in five to 10 years.
- Focus on the success of your business.
- Use the present tense and clear language.
- Have a plan to communicate your vision to your employees.
- Be inspiring and engaging to your staff.
A vision statement can be useful to unify your team and ensure everyone knows that there is an overall point to their roles. If you’re based in York, North Yorkshire or East Riding and this sounds useful to your business then get in touch with the Growth Hub and we’ll put you in the right direction to get relevant funding. For example, the Manufacturing Growth Programme provides a grant scheme to cover 35% of the cost for a consultant that could help you develop your vision.
Developing a strategy for growth
Developing growth strategies can encourage sustainability in your business. You’ll be prepared for what’s to come and less likely to face unexpected hurdles. Learning to be resilient through planning is especially necessary since markets and trends are constantly changing.
Developing a strategy for growth is about creating a solid plan to you can get from point A to B. There are some key areas you should think about when developing a growth strategy business plan:
- Know your unique selling point (USP): to have successful long-term growth, you need to be able to stand apart from your competitors – this usually depends on what makes you unique. If you’re looking to grow and reach new markets, you need to understand what attracts your current customers and be able to use this to reach new consumers. For more information on your USP, check out this article.
- Know who you’re selling to: customers are everything in business, so look into who exactly buys your product. Is this who you envisioned as your ideal customer? Adjust your business to suit the needs of who’s interested in your products, e.g. develop a new product that has been manufactured especially for that consumer.
- Know your competition: look at businesses in your sector that are growing and are they successful? You can learn from their experiences and tailor it to your business and what you want to achieve.
- Be confident in your staff: your employees are a vital part of your business, so make sure you hire people that are passionate and ready to handle your business’s growth. When developing your business, your team may need to take part in training days, so they need to be motivated and prepared to learn.
Having a growth strategy in place will also be useful to help you get funding support, as traditional and alternative lenders like to see you have a clear plan of action. To save yourself time finding the funding support, give the Growth Hub a call if you’re in the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding area and we’ll see what is available for you. This could include funding from the Skills Support for the Workforce, which will pay for training courses so you can develop your staff and prepare them for growth.
Strategic planning and setting the goals
When setting work goals, the most important thing is to be realistic. It won’t benefit your business if you simply say you want to be a big success, because what does that actually mean? Success can be defined in numerous different ways. Your goals should be measurable and developed from a SWOT analysis.
SWOT analysis simply stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The strengths and weaknesses are internal factors, whilst threats and opportunities are external factors that could influence your business. By identifying these, you’ll be able to set work goals. For example, one threat to your business could be the market that you want to export into. The vulnerabilities within this include, who is your competition and are there any regulations that mean your product needs to change? So, one of your goals would have to include market research. By completing this chart, you’ll also be able to increase resilience within your business by acknowledging what the potential risks are.
The chart below was taken from this website which includes further examples of SWOT analysis:
Setting goals through a SWOT analysis can help you to understand your business better, address weaknesses, capitalise on opportunities and support developing growth strategies for achieving your goals. If you’re not sure where to get started with this tool, get in touch with the York, North Yorkshire and East Ridng Growth Hub. There are various funding programmes available in this area, which could benefit you. For example, the Manufacturing Growth Programme provides a grant scheme to help cover the costs of a consultant who could advise on SWOT analysis tests.
Defining Success
Defining success in business is useful to create growth goals to work towards. First, you need to think about what defines a successful business? People are often define it differently, but if you know what it means to your business, you can see what has worked well for your business and how to continue this trend. For example, if you’ve been successful at developing a marketing strategy that increases sales, why has this happened? Did you change your route to market to better suit your target audience? Whatever you discover was the cause, you now know to continue this in the future for further successes.
One way to look at defining success is by asking yourself have you achieved what you set out to do? By going through each planning stage, you should be able to easily review this. Look at what your goals were and your future plans – have you accomplished everything that you wanted to, or did you face any struggles?
It’s good to be positive and define success, but don’t overlook the negatives. When evaluating your business, it’s also useful to think about what didn’t work, so you can avoid this in the future. If you’re not sure where to start with this stage, give the Growth Hub a call and we’ll be happy to check if there’s funding available for you. If your business is in York, North Yorkshire of East Riding, you could be eligible for the Manufacturing Growth Programme, which will support the payment of a consultant who can help you understand your success.
Strategic planning tools
To help create your business strategy, there are various tools available for you, such as the SWOT analysis, which is explained above. These planning tools can help you to plan efficiently, so that you can be more effective in your process and save time and money. There are variants of the SWOT analysis to help strategic planning, such as the SOAR, which stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations and Results and it is more strengths-based than the SWOT analysis. All of these tools will help you to build up resilience in your business. It’s better to be safe than sorry. By preparing for potential threats to your business, you’ll be more able to manage them if they do occur.
- Porter’s Five Forces Analysis
The Porter’s Five Forces Analysis is a method that can be used to establish where the balance of power lies in your business. This tool is useful for strategic planning in business as it demonstrates both the strength of your current competitive position and the strength of the position you want to move into, which could help you grow your market share.
Five Forces Analysis proposes that there are five important forces that determine competitive power, including:
- Supplier power: assess whether it is likely for your suppliers to drive up prices, think about their control over you and how much you rely on them. If you rely on one supplier and they go bankrupt, where will you get your necessary materials? Make sure you have alternative options, so the power isn’t completely in your supplier’s hands.
- Buyer power: assess how easy it is for buyers to drive prices down, the importance of each individual buyer to buyer.
- Competitive rivalry: how many competitors do you have and how much does their success impact your business.
- Threat of substitution: this is the possibility that your customers could find another product or process that is the same as yours. If the substitution is easy then this weakens your position.
- Threat of new entry: Consider who is entering your market and whether they could pose a threat to your business.
These components can be brought into a neat diagram, such as the one shown below from the Mind Tools website (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_08.htm):
- PEST Analysis
Whilst a SWOT analysis, one of the more well-known strategic planning tools, is focused on a business or idea, a PEST analysis is concerned with measuring a market. PEST analysis stands for Political, Economic, Social and Technological, and these are necessary to analyse your business situation and how your business could be affected in the long-term. It can also be useful to understand how you could get ahead of your competitors. For example, economic issues have led businesses to increase their prices. But, you’ve been able to keep yours at a lowered cost, which could be an advantage to draw customers in. PEST analysis could also help you to avoid projects that are likely to fail because of reasons beyond your control, so there’s less risk that you’ll be investing your money unwisely.
- Political: you will need to assess government regulations and legal factors and how these could affect your ability to trade. This could include any political instability, tax guidelines, employment laws etc.
- Economic: be aware of economic issues that could impact your business, such as inflation and interest rates.
- Social: think about social issues and how these could affect your product, e.g. your customer’s lifestyle and education, so you can understand how your consumer’s needs are developed.
- Technological: can technology positively or negatively impact your product entering a marketplace.
Sometimes you might see an extension of this known as PESTEL analysis, which is an extended version with Legal (discrimination laws, health and safety) and environment conditions (changes in weather and climate) added to it.
You might not want to go through every planning tool, but you’re got a lot of options and picking a winner might be difficult. Speak to us at the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub and we can see what support is available for you. If you need a consultant, but don’t have the funds, we can point you towards the Manufacturing Growth Programme, this is a grant scheme to help businesses with the costs of expert advice.
Implementing strategy
Creating a strategy can decrease the potential for vulnerabilities within your business, but it’s not enough. You need to follow through with the planning stages and ensure that your strategy becomes implemented within your business. This is sometimes a fault for businesses – you know planning is important, so you spend all your time doing this then forgot to work out the logistics of implementing these changes. By considering the following, implementing your strategy should be more achievable:
- Clarify your strategy – make sure your plan is accessible to everyone on the team, so they can fully understand what you want to achieve and can get behind it.
- Communicate your strategy – communication is key. You’ll need to ensure that your strategic planning is passed onto everyone, as they’ll all need to know about the bigger picture.
- Cascade your strategy – translate your strategy into manageable task, so explain to people what their role is and how that’ll impact your business’s goals. People need to have responsibility and a stake in the plan to feel committed to it.
All of these activities will help you efficiently achieve your goal. For further guidance, get in touch with the Growth Hub. You may find there’s funding support available, such as the Manufacturing Growth Programme, a grant scheme which targets businesses in York, North Yorkshire and East Riding, so that they can access consultants.
Identifying and managing risks
By doing the strategic planning, you’ll have discovered the different risks and obstacles that your business might face. Don’t just forget about these incidents, you need to manage the risks and put measures in place to be resilient. Once you’ve put safety nets in place for the risks, you’ll be able to limit potential damages to your business, such as unnecessary costs.
A business continuity plan can help increase resilience. This form of planning is preparing for the worst outcomes, but also choosing the most appropriate way to respond to them that will benefit your business. This will help you to respond quicker to potentially damaging events. You should have most of the answers already at your fingertips from your strategic planning tools, such as the PEST analysis, where you’ve considered possible political implications and risks.
Risk management is a similar process to business continuity planning, which you might find useful to handle potential vulnerabilities to your business. With this, you must identify and control possible threats to your business. It includes prioritizing your risks and understanding what is most relevant for you. If you’re interested in this, check out our section on risk management on the Continuous Improvement page (link).
Business insurance can also help to manage risks in your business. There is a wide range of insurance to help protect your business and prevent unnecessary costs further down the line. For example, cyber insurance, property, product liability insurance, vehicle insurance and many more.
Finally, it might be useful putting your staff through their paces with some training on being resilient. They’re a main part of your business, so it’s important that they know what to do if something goes wrong. Funding support for training includes Skills Support for the Workforce, which will cover the cost of bespoke courses for your team if you’re based in York, North Yorkshire and East Riding. If you call the Growth Hub, we can point you in the right direction for how to access this funding.
Business and manufacturing strategy
Cutting costs and increasing productivity are just two of the reasons why you might want to revamp your business. But, simply improving the manufacturing process by adopting a new device is not enough to get a competitive advantage.
You will need to develop your manufacturing strategy carefully and avoid generic goals, such as beating your competition. Your main focus should be how – how will you be better than your competition? How will your staff handle any improvements to the production line?
Some of the manufacturing strategy approaches include:
- Flexible manufacturing
As the name suggests, this is a business strategy that is easily adaptable to fit the ever-changing market. It’s focused on the ability to change products when necessary and adapt to consumer demand.
- Lean manufacturing
With this strategy, the aim is to streamline the manufacturing process by reducing the waste of material and increasing productivity, so that cost is reduced and the business becomes more efficient.
There isn’t a one-size fits all, or an overall winner – you will need to analyse how your business would fit in with the requirements of the strategy. If you’re based in York, North Yorkshire and East Riding, get in touch with the Growth Hub and we’ll let you know what your options are. You’ll be able to access consultants through the Manufacturing Growth Programme, and if you need new machinery for lean manufacturing, the Product and Process Innovation scheme could help you to fund that.
Conclusion
Every business needs to do some form of planning to reduce risks and improve funding support opportunities. Whatever your viewpoint (some people love planning, some people hate it), the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Growth Hub can provide a helping hand. We’re here for a friendly chat to get to the bottom of your planning issues and put you on the right track for business support and funding opportunities.
If your interested in finding our more then you can get in touch at support@howsbusiness.org