Grow your business: it’s a question of (business) strategy.

Being an SME has its advantages, but you need to know how to use them to compete on the market and grow your business.

Having lean organizations, being more in touch with their customers, being quick to adapt to market changes and being able to focus on medium-long term (rather than short-term) profits are the key advantages of SMEs to grow their business. Because it’s not true that SMEs don’t want to grow, it’s just that – often – they are scared of doing it.

And it is understandable, since when we talk about growth we immediately think of volumes, market share, forgetting that there are two types of growth: the healthy one and the less healthy one, the one that favors profits and the one that only looks at volumes.

So what does your SME need to compete and grow its business in a healthy and sustainable way over time? You need some strategic thinking and a “tool” to guide you in the activities to be implemented.

In short, you need a corporate (or business) strategy.

Your business strategy determines choices for your company.

The most beautiful definition ever given regarding what a corporate strategy is is the following: “strategy means choosing”; that is, it means deciding which customers / markets to serve and how to serve them, unlike the competition.

The “how” is represented by that plan of actions that your company must implement to compete and build its competitive advantage.

Reporting your business strategy in writing will help you turn your ideas and choices into actions, and actions into results, keeping the focus on what is really important (not urgent) for your business, without wasting resources necessary to achieve results.

Three practical tips to write your winning business strategy now.

Unlike large companies, which have to plan everything very carefully by lengthening reaction times excessively, an SME sensitive to market trends and which has developed good relationships with its customers is able to capture the trends and / or needs of the moment and react quickly.

So do not wait, beat the competition even on time, and put into practice the following tips to develop your business and improve your company’s profits.

1. Seize the moment: what’s going on in your market?

Gather your most trusted collaborators and discuss what the threats and challenges the market poses to you. Starting from your company’s strengths and weaknesses, investigate how you can deal with them to develop the business. A new product in line with new trends or customer requests? A new distribution channel? Another customer target?

2. Check the identified opportunities

After exploring with your team what are the most interesting areas on which to focus the company’s energies, you must determine the potential and attractiveness of the opportunities. In particular, you will have to ask questions like: what are the dimensions of the market in terms of turnover and volumes? There are already competitors, how do they operate? Are there any barriers to entry? What are the success factors of that market? Can I leverage my company’s strengths to enter that market?

The intent is to understand if it is really worth taking one or more of the opportunities you have identified, if there are any risks, what objectives (quantifiable) you can set yourself and what you need to do to play that game and achieve the results you set yourself .

Do you want help in determining the potential and attractiveness of new business opportunities? Our business tool designed to help you expand your business and grow your profits.

3. Take action, write your business strategy

Writing your strategy involves “condensing” in a sentence or paragraph all the work you have done previously in points 1 and 2 above. Writing your own strategy is comparable to writing a mission statement which must include 3 fundamental elements: the objective, the reference market in which you intend to operate and your competitive advantage.

Are there the 3 basic elements?

Measurable goal: to increase turnover by 10 million euros by 2020.

Reference market: enriched pasta (market segment), consumer attentive to nutrition and gluten intolerant (target).

Competitive advantage: use of highly nutritious special flours, slow processing for exceptional cooking resistance, the channels chosen to distribute the range.

As you will notice from the example, the strategy you will define will guide you in the actions that you and your team will have to implement to achieve the result, always keeping the focus on the activities and any investments that are functional to the strategy.

One last consideration: a business strategy has a time frame that varies according to the sector in which you operate (on average 3-5 years), but it is not static. It evolves according to how the market and / or the target you are targeting changes to. It is therefore important to review it at least every year to understand if adjustments need to be made.