Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11

Strategizing for Growth and Sustainability

In This Chapter

• Differentiating strategy from tactics
• Determining the value-creating strategy for your organization
• Growing your business by using current products and developing new ones

At the end of the day, what's every business trying to do? Grow. Businesses strive to grow more customers, more sales, positive cash flow, larger deal sizes, higher volume, more billable hours, justification for higher prices, and so on. Ask any hardworking entrepreneur what he or she is working on and you're bound to hear a comment related to growth. Growth is why you're in business — to build or create something bigger than yourselves. Because if you're not growing, you're shrinking.

With that said, you don't want to focus on growth for growth's sake because growth is just the means to an end. Your desire to grow must match up with your vision for your organization. Growing rapidly, growing incrementally, or maintaining your current position requires specific strategies.

In this chapter, you discover the different paths for growth and sustainability strategies. You understand how to travel in more than one direction to find partners and acquire others. Lastly, you look at how to evaluate the different growth strategies against each other to get a clear picture of your strategic choices.

One thought to consider: Only 49 percent of executives surveyed say their companies have no list of strategic priorities. According to Cesare R. Mainardi, ...