I’m an advocate of a DIY (do it yourself) approach to growth planning. In a nutshell, I maintain that an organization like yours will benefit more from building a proprietary system for growth planning, rather than from relying on someone else’s construct. Instead of a fill-in-the-blanks assignment, the actual creation of the process brings positive results in and of itself.
“We started to think and talk strategically from the very be-ginning,” says PrintingForLess.com (PFL) founder, Andrew Field. In the beginning, the planning process was pretty simple. Once a month or so, they would order pizza and get together as a group to discuss any and all things. Not much was written down, but pretty clear goals and directions were established. Field and his key managers also met regularly with their outside board of advisors. “The advisory board really helped us keep our focus early on,” Field adds. This system carried the fast-growth company up to the point of about 30 employees. “Once we got over 30 employees,” says Field, “it was obvious we needed to do something a little more formalized. By this point we had written a few plans for the outside world and that helped us see how a written plan could help us internally as well.”
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