Planning with Sustainable Growth in Mind: A Strategic Approach

My sister’s middle school agriculture project creates a great parallel to a lesson we often have to learn when it comes to business growth. In her raised-bed garden, she planted four varieties of plants (​​spearmint, chocolate mint, sweet mint, and lemon balm), with the expectation that they would essentially cancel out each other’s aggressive tendencies and would peacefully coexist. Instead, the sweet mint dominated the entire bed, leaving only a tiny corner for lemon balm (and effectively killing the other two plants). The following year, despite this experience, she repeated the pattern with oregano, sage, and tomatoes. The oregano now reigns supreme (with a very small portion of sage surviving).

This gardening mishap mirrors what happens in many small businesses. Owners start with dreams of work-life balance and flexibility, only to find their business — like that aggressive sweet mint — taking over everything. As your company grows, new challenges emerge: expanding payroll, managing more clients, and scaling processes. While growth is positive, without strategic planning, it can overwhelm both your business operations and personal life. So how do we cultivate sustainable growth?

Growing Sustainably

Sustainable growth, in a business context, is generally seen as the growth your company can maintain long-term without running into crippling issues. From a broader perspective, sustainable business growth is the rate of growth your business can sustain while maintaining healthy cashflow and without hurting the social and environmental spheres it interacts with. That includes burning out your team – and yourself. For example:

• If your business growth is hurting your ability to function outside of work, it’s not sustainable.
• If your business has grown so much that you can’t keep up with the amount of work, but you aren’t making enough revenue to hire a new employee, it’s not sustainable.
• If increased client work is preventing you from delivering a great client experience and marketing your service and product offers to gain future clients, you guessed it: it’s not sustainable.

Most, if not all, of these problems are natural effects of growth; you have increased workload, which means you work more, which means you start to burn out and can’t work as productively. Naturally, certain tasks fall to the wayside and before you know it you feel overwhelmed and exhausted and behind on everything, and you’re not really sure how you got here. The path to sustainable growth is to plan ahead and be strategic by anticipating your business’s needs. (Key words here being “plan ahead”; we want to be proactive in our businesses.)

How to Grow Strategically

Here are five tips to plan with sustainable growth in mind:

1. Get clear on your systems and processes now – before you’re overwhelmed by work.

You may have heard the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.” The best time to get crystal clear on your systems and automate what can be automated is before you’re in crisis mode and overwhelmed by your to-do list. If you’re already there, the second best time is now. This will save you a massive amount of time and energy on repetitive administrative tasks so you can focus on creative work and client needs.

2. Design your offers to maximize customer retention.

This can look like product funnels, subscription services, retainer clients, or taking steps to ensure positive client experiences. The more previous customers want to work with you again or refer their friends to you, the fewer new customers you have to hunt down with your marketing efforts, so make sure you treat your current clients well and that your services or products are meeting their needs. (This can be a great time to do market research and to ask for client feedback.)

3. Train and treat your employees well.

Invest in your team through thorough training, constructive feedback, and professional development opportunities. When feasible, provide competitive benefits like health insurance and PTO. Well-trained, supported employees become valuable assets who drive business growth through innovation and strong client relationships while reducing turnover costs and management stress.

4. Set clear goals.

A business without a clear direction is bound to stagnate or experience mission drift. When you’re planning for the future, have a strong idea of where you want to take your business, how quickly, and what steps you should take to get there in the given timeframe.

5. Aim to increase revenue and savings over time.

This one seems obvious, but the goal is to ensure that your business can withstand any surprises in the future that might suddenly increase your workload or decrease your profit for a short period of time. Make sure you make enough profit to contribute to your business savings account, that you have enough saved to supplement your employees’ salaries if there’s a bad month for sales, that you can buy new equipment or hire a contractor if something breaks or your website starts glitching, etc. Consider this a form of risk management.

Final Thoughts

These five steps should form a strong foundation for sustainable business growth and set you on the path to success as you expand your business. One last suggestion for sustainable growth, but also for forming a sustainable mindset and culture in your business, is to set firm boundaries around work. Have hours where you are unavailable for anything work-related, spend time with your loved ones, take time off around the holidays, or go on vacation – and encourage these same boundaries for your full team. Sometimes boundaries need to be pushed when you’re in crisis mode or an emergency is happening, but most of the time you can afford to be firm. And, it’s actually more beneficial to you and your business long-term for you to take care of your mental and physical health by maintaining a healthy work-life balance and managing work-related stressors.

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