The primary objective of any business is to grow in terms of profits and offers, and to make a place for itself among other players in the market.

To do this, she therefore sees the need to develop a growth strategy. But this plan should not be disconnected from the overall business strategy.

Indeed, as your business expands, you must meet a series of challenges aimed at maintaining your company, adapting your management capacity to the pace of its growth.

This is why it is important to adopt a solid business strategy that allows you to develop as well as manage your growth.

To learn more about the subject, discover How to develop an effective business strategy for startups hither.

What is a business strategy? How do you develop a successful business strategy? After defining the concept and discussing the reasons for implementing such a strategy, we offer 11 tips to help you develop an effective business strategy over the long term.

Business strategy: definition

Define a business strategy First and foremost, it involves determining the mission that a company has in order to create value.

This project requires a medium or long-term vision that guides the manager to make choices and thus achieve his goals.

According to the mission and vision defined, the management team will have to make several choices that are essential for the future of the company concerning the allocation of resources and skills.

These choices, financial, human, material, marketing... actively participate in the success or failure of business strategies.

Why implement a business strategy?

To face a market that is constantly evolving more rapidly, it is essential for an entrepreneur to establish a clear strategy.

Indeed, without such planning, the company risks being subject to events and hazards, and only reacting rather than acting and creating value.

In addition, strategic thinking, such as the one you can get in calling on business strategy advice, helps you make the right choices to give your business the impetus it needs to grow.

How do you develop a successful business strategy?

Deploying business strategies requires three steps:

the carrying out of a diagnosis, the definition and implementation of strategic growth choices and, finally, the good management of this growth.

Step 1 - Carry out a strategic business diagnosis

To define the general strategy of your company, you will first have to carry out an in-depth diagnosis by answering several questions:

• What is the essential mission of your company? Why was it founded? What does its activity consist of?
• What vision do you have for your company? What are your goals for this one?
• What are the inseparable values of your brand?

In addition, you will need to look at the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities of your business.

To take stock of these elements, you need to make strategic external and internal diagnoses.

The external strategic diagnosis

This audit concerns the environment that impacts the activity of your company. It involves identifying the opportunities and threats that lie in front of it.

The internal strategic diagnosis

This process allows you to review the internal strengths and weaknesses of your company. To carry it out successfully, it is a question of classifying all the company's resources as assets or weaknesses.

Both financial resources and material, human, technological resources... are concerned.

This analysis is useful for identifying potential competitive advantages, but also for developing areas for improvement.

Step 2 - Define the best growth strategy to adopt for your business

Depending on the results of the analysis carried out, a business manager can develop a growth strategy based on both assets and opportunities as well as on areas of progress internal or external to the company.

Focus on the 7 strategic axes to explore to boost your business development.

1. Optimize your customer relationship

The growth of a business depends, of course, on the number of sales of goods or services.

However, one of the main levers for increasing the number of sales is convincing new customers and building customer loyalty. The keys to achieve this: prospecting and the good use of customer data.

In order to help entrepreneurs in this area of development, some tools are proving to be the most effective, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.

Among these most efficient functionalities:

• centralization of customer data
• the possibility of sending personalized emails: sending birthday promotions, discounts, sending a newsletter after registration
• the possibilities of relaunching after interruption of attendance or basket abandonment.

2. Develop your communication and visibility

Another major factor in business growth concerns digital marketing.

Indeed, this communication solution is nowadays essential to promote your business and encourage the engagement of its target audience.

In order to make the most of this solution, feel free to test some of the following digital marketing methods:

• creation of content optimized for SEO on your website
• development of your social networks
• launching a newsletter
• creation of emailing campaigns...

3. Hiring the right people and learning to delegate

Whether you need to recruit employees or find new partners, the right cast of profiles is essential in a growth strategy for your business.

Knowing that the first selection criterion is above all to hire people with whom you can build lasting relationships of trust.

This criterion will allow you, in fact, to delegate calmly, to take advantage of interesting skills to develop your activities and to let your businesses flourish at different scales.

A good human resources policy therefore plays an active role in development plan for a strategic leader.

Note: if at the time of launching your business, you do not have sufficient resources to hire full-time, do not neglect to explore some options: recruiting contract workers, hiring part-time, using freelancers.

4. Granting yourself good material conditions

Choosing the right workspace and equipment is one of the elements that can have a significant impact on the growth of a company. Investing in these areas can make a difference by allowing you to develop a network, especially if you are integrating a business area, an incubator or a coworking space.

5. Manage your cash flow well

Optimizing cash flow is a vital precaution for any company's growth strategy.

Indeed, good management makes it possible to reassure partners and investors and to facilitate professional bank loans. Such a situation promotes credibility.

To properly manage your cash flow and facilitate the acquisition of resources and the implementation of any project:

• Anticipate the inflows and outflows of money (and the variations depending on the activity) thanks to a business plan
• keep a reserve for more difficult periods in order to settle any supplier debts, to pay taxes...
• Play on the deadline for paying bills, increase prices, or ask the tax authorities for help.

As a business manager, you can also use a digital solution that manages your cash flow for you.

Such a tool allows you to analyze your data to properly manage your sales cycles and compare numbers to identify trends and opportunities.

6. Reinvest in your business

Another essential lever to develop your business consists in reinvesting regularly in it.

For this investment to be constructive, define your goals carefully.

This may include developing new products, improving your marketing, as mentioned above, improving your marketing, hiring or investing in new premises or equipment, or taking over competing establishments.

Whatever your project, injecting capital while ensuring compliance with your company's business plan is one of the most effective ways to enable it to grow.

7. Know how to change the legal status of your company

For a manager who wants to develop his company, changing its legal form can actively contribute to unblocking certain situations.

Indeed, by opting for a legal form that is certainly more demanding from an accounting, fiscal and social point of view, the company manager will nevertheless be able to recruit, delegate or even join forces.

These elements are particularly beneficial in achieving its growth objectives.

Such a change in legal form also makes it easier to obtain a bank loan or to raise funds.

Concretely, going from the status of microentrepreneur to the status of SASU or EURL allows, for example, to borrow to develop your business.

Indeed, these more demanding statuses from an accounting and fiscal point of view reassure financial institutions.

Likewise, making your company evolve from the status of SASU or EURL to that of SARL or SAS (multi-personal company) allows you to consider joining forces.

Step 3 - Business Strategy: Learning to Manage Growth

A moment of strong growth, also called a “scale-up”, involves numerous upheavals within a company.

This evolution has an impact on financial management as well as on human resources and on the organization of the company as a whole.

Know how to maintain a reasonable pace of growth

Above all, a growth strategy must be based on a business plan.

This allows management to define the extent of the desired growth through a schedule.

It helps to list the resources needed to reach your goals and to preview the impact of growth on businesses, staff...

Such a plan leads to planning and anticipating the changes to be made in terms of marketing and sales actions.

Manage calmly

Rapid growth implies an overload of work that can easily lead to less human management and the overwork of managers and teams.

It is therefore important to quickly take the right actions as a leader in terms of human resources management in the face of such a situation.

These decisions consist of:

• facilitate communication between employees with collaborative digital tools, project management solutions, or instant messaging to streamline exchanges between the various stakeholders.
• Know how to preserve yourself as a manager and maintain your teams by hiring: employees, sales director, marketing manager...
• allow your teams and yourself to balance your time between professional and private life.
• take care of its employees with effective onboarding in order to integrate each new member into the team calmly, offer teleworking days, schedules adapted to the pace of each one, training and career development offers...

Don't forget your core business

The mission and vision of a company are the bases on which it is essential to stay focused.

These are the fundamental elements that will allow it to continue its growth.

Thus, if a company's main mission is to sell a “luxury” product, it must remain faithful to this orientation even if it wishes to diversify its offer.

Among the options to be integrated into its strategic development plan, it may therefore decide to sell more compact “luxury” products.

Ensuring innovation

Another trap to avoid when a company grows: sacrificing the “innovation” pole, also referred to by the expression “Research and Development”.

Even in full growth, a company must remain innovative and launch new products.

Indeed, the development of new products takes time and a lack of innovation can ultimately stop the growth of a company, allowing competitors to gain market shares in an area where it itself will have fallen behind.

Staying attentive to your environment, the latest innovations and the needs of your customers is therefore essential in order to develop winning products that will allow you to meet the expectations of new markets.

Taking such precautions proves to be the guarantee of sustainable growth.

Managers, you now have multiple lines of thought to define a strategy, boost the growth of your business and know how to manage it.

However, to be effective, a business strategy must be developed rigorously based on a proven methodology.

So, do not hesitate to ask for thesupport for coaching professionals for business leaders and managers.

They will be able to guide you in creating and implementing a strategy that will drive the growth of your business, while helping you to live this evolution well.