Preparing to grow

Understanding how your business is performing

These different measures can show you how your business is performing:

• financial - how much profit are you making, how much cash flow you have
• customers - how many you have, how often they use you and how many you have lost or gained
• customer service - waiting times and complaints
• market share - whether your share of the market has increased or decreased
• staff - satisfaction, work quality and attendance records

Business Gateway has a measuring performance guide.

These performance measures can be used in a business plan

Business planning

It can be helpful to create a business plan for growth. As well as including how the business is performing, you can use it to:

• assess where you can grow
• set targets and check that you're meeting them
• point out where things are going wrong

Many businesses choose to check performance against a business plan every 3 - 6 months.

Business Gateway has a template business plan.

Is your business ready to grow?

A SWOT analysis can help with when and how to grow by focusing on your:

• strengths
• weaknesses
• opportunities
• threats

Your SWOT analysis can be used to plan strategically for your business growth by helping you to think about:

• what research you might need to do
• developing products or services for growth
• whether to grow the home market or export
• your competitors
• marketing your products or services

Understanding the competition

Understanding how your competitors do business can:

• help you spot gaps in the market
• identify areas for improvement
• set prices competitively

Business Gateway has guidance on market and customer research.