Long Term Growth

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When you step on the first rung of the entrepreneurial ladder your team is often a team of one—and that’s you. You wear all of the hats and work all hours of the day as you strive to realize your ltg1dream. And, if you’re like me, you do it all from the bedroom of your parents’ home. Or, maybe you’re lucky enough to have a separate room or some garage space to utilize.

But eventually, as your business begins to grow you’ll discover that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything yourself and you’ll be stretched thinner and thinner. You can’t do the sales and the marketing, the bookkeeping, and the fulfillment, and everything else involved, all by yourself.

Congratulations. You need help. You’re beginning to build a real business.[1]

At least at this point of you will have the first ideas about how to get further with the development of your business. Probably until this stage you have thought mostly on the short term, how to make it until tomorrow or end of the week. Starting from this point you might have also ideas and thoughts about how to sustain the development that you had until now, you are starting to develop long term growth plans.

Economic growth is the increase in the market value of the goods and services that an economy or business organization produces over time.[2]

ltg2The most important steps to consider for long term growth are :

Step 1. Decide what you are playing for.
From small business to large, executives confront a constant tension between managing what is and creating new growth. That tension manifests itself as a continual battle for attention, time, and resources. We like to say, “You get what you play for.” You can’t just wish or want to do something; you have to put your time, energy, and attention into getting it done. Do you want long-term growth? Then you have to stop wanting it and start doing something about it. Growth requires leadership. You don’t have to do it all, but you can’t just delegate it and hope someone else will do it for you.

Step 2. Get everyone speaking the same language.
Long-term growth doesn’t come from doing the same things you did yesterday and hoping for a different result. In our world, growth means fostering transformational or breakthrough innovation. And, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most powerful initial steps a leader can take to pursue innovation is to define your terms. If you don’t think this matters, go ask five smart colleagues to define “breakthrough innovation.” Write down their answers and then see if you agree.

Step 3. Imagine your future.
Alan Kay said, famously, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” If you want sustainable growth, you must have a sense of what the future will be, what it will require, and how you will win. Then you can direct your breakthrough innovation efforts toward achieving the vision — predicting the future by creating it.

Step 4. Align your actions with your intentions.

In an article this past January in HBR titled “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention,” the author offered a framework for this step. Here, in a nutshell, is the three-box model: “A forward-looking CEO must do three things: Manage the present, selectively forget the past, and create the future.” Steps 1 through 3 gets you ready. Now use the three-box model to consider how to balance what you’re currently doing with what you need to do, and to free up the resources you need to do it. In most cases, you will find that you are overloaded on box 1, things you do to manage the present. You need some box 2, things you can reduce or eliminate that are no longer relevant either to the present or the future, and some box 3, new things you will do to create the future.

Step 5. Do it!
Growth is hard work requiring strategy, judgment, and leadership. It involves risk. It involves you. You and your organization will get what you pay for. If you play only for today’s performance, that’s all you will get. If you want growth, you’re going to have to invest yourself.[3]

As you could see above long term growth is not that easy but is not impossible. You have done it so far to get your business up and running, the long term growth planning is only a natural continuation of what you have done so far with a little twist, the focus is set long term this time.

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Reference :

[1] http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/building-a-team-for-long-term-growth

[2] https://www.boundless.com/economics/textbooks/boundless-economics-textbook/economic-growth-20/long-run-growth-99/determinants-of-long-run-growth-371-12468/

[3] https://hbr.org/2011/09/five-steps-long-term-growth

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