4 Steps to Growth Planning

Growth Planning: Plan less and grow faster

Woman working in storefront

Almost any business owner will tell you they want to spend less time planning and more time growing their business. And yet the day-to-day operations leave them with little time to strategize how they'll achieve that growth. What's missing is a simple process and the right tool to help you build and share a solid strategy without slowing you down.

That's why we've developed growth planning— a better, smarter, and simpler business planning process that's baked right into LivePlan.

Growth planning is much easier than writing a traditional business plan. It's a process that takes a fraction of the time and will ultimately help you optimize your business through simple and efficient business management.

Here's how LivePlan helps you with growth planning:

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1. Plan: Quickly develop your overall strategy

Creating a one-page business plan is the perfect canvas to outline your business idea. LivePlan will help you create a beautiful one-page overview of your business and your strategy for success.

You'll develop your business model, and you can easily share it online with partners and investors or export it for a presentation.

You should be able to create your initial one-page plan in under an hour. It's the fastest way to jumpstart the planning process.

And, if you need a more detailed business plan, LivePlan does that, too. Use LivePlan to create detailed business plan documents with step-by-step instructions and examples along the way.

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2. Forecast: Easily set an initial budget

With your strategy in place, the next step in the growth planning process is to run the numbers. LivePlan makes it easy to create a complete financial forecast without complex Excel templates or confusing accounting terminology.

You'll be able to quickly figure out how profitable your business is going to be and if you need to get funding to start your business.

LivePlan will automatically generate all of the financial reports, charts, and graphs you need. Learn more about LivePlan's forecasting features.

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2. Easy Budgeting and Financial Forecasting
3. Track Your Tasks

3. Review: Hold yourself accountable

Tracking your performance is arguably the most important step in growth planning. Without tracking the key metrics for your business, you won't know if things are going well or going poorly. Spotting trends early and making adjustments to your strategy is critical to business success.

Use LivePlan's milestones scheduler to set your key business goals, define who will own them, and by what date - so you can track all your major business initiatives as you go.

LivePlan's Dashboard connects to your accounting software (QuickBooks or Xero) to automatically create a performance dashboard using your real data. Without crunching any numbers, you'll always know if you're on track to meet the goals you've set for your business and get the insights you need to keep your business healthy.

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4. Refine: Pivot quickly to adapt to any opportunity

When you can clearly see how your business is doing, you gain the power and confidence to strategically take advantage of new opportunities or react to new challenges.

Using LivePlan's Live Forecast feature, your forecast automatically adjusts to reflect what's going on in your business, so you can see where your business is headed - all without running complex simulations. You can then easily adjust your goals and your budget to adapt to changing conditions.

Not sure which direction you want to take your business? Experiment with different situations using LivePlan's scenarios and figure out the best time to expand, take on funding, hire more employees, buy new equipment, change your prices, etc.

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4. Manage Your Business