Challenge
Achieving sustainable growth requires a well-thought-out plan and relentless and disciplined effective execution. It’s hard to ensure you have all the right components in your plans and even more so to hold yourself to account in the execution phase.
Again, ask yourself these questions:
| Question | Why it’s important |
|---|---|
| Do you have a robust plan to accelerate your growth and achieve your ambitions? | A detailed growth plan provides a roadmap for achieving your business goals and helps in identifying potential roadblocks. It’s a blow-by-blow, month-by-month, year-by-year route map towards your definition of success, drives singular focus and allows everyone to align around your agency vision and mission. |
| Is your business match fit compared to your peers? | Benchmarking against peers helps in understanding your competitive position and identifying areas for improvement. But what are the right benchmarks and what are the right hurdle rates to be looking to achieve? No point wasting time and money polishing up something that your future acquirer isn’t interested in. |
| Are there things in the agency that don’t work as well as they should? | Identifying inefficiencies is crucial for optimising operations and ensuring smooth growth. Your gut will be telling you things it knows aren’t ideal, but what to do about them? The issues need to be addressed in the plan that takes you forward. |
| Does your plan fix those problems for you? | A good growth plan should address all existing issues, anticipate future ones and provide solutions to overcome them all within the prescribed timescale. If your plan isn’t this granular with accountabilities allocated, then you have work to do. |
| If you need funding to accelerate your plan, is your business attractive enough to investors? | Attracting investment requires demonstrating strong performance metrics and a compelling value proposition. Investors fund the plan and the leadership, if one or the other isn’t there or robust enough then options for funding organic or inorganic growth will be limited. Give yourself options by being well planned. |
Solution:
It’s simple really, step back and create a detailed growth plan that addresses strategy and focus for the agency with the end objective in mind. It should address potential roadblocks and outline clear steps to achieve your ambitions.
Ensure your business is attractive to investors by demonstrating your strategic foresight combined with strong performance metrics and a compelling value proposition to take you there.
Why its essential:
A well-defined growth plan is critical for setting clear objectives and strategies for everyone in the senior team and wider agency. It becomes your playbook for success and helps in identifying and addressing operational inefficiencies. It’s a dynamic and evolving playbook that ensures the agency is prepared to succeed as well as to attract investment and scale effectively at the right moment. It will also galvanise your wider team and ensure they’re excited about the future.
Waypoint can help you
Waypoint has developed hundreds of plans to help agencies accelerate their success and have also implemented these plan successfully in their own agency businesses’
