Chapter 4
In this chapter you will start creating a Scale Up Plan for your business.
But first a quick recap: in lesson one I told the story of how the British Cycling Team achieved seemingly impossible results by making small improvements in many areas. The purpose of that story was show you that success is a journey, not a destination.
With the Seven Keys Formula, it’s a journey that involves making modest gains in several areas of your business — which results in sales and profit growth over the year — and repeating this success over a few years to scale up your business.
The Seven Keys Formula is all about practical strategies for growth, so now let’s start applying these principles to your business, using something called the Business Growth Calculator.
The aim of the Business Growth Calculator (BGC) is to vividly illustrate the impact of implementing the Seven Keys Formula (SKF) in your business. It will also form the starting point for your Scale Up Plan, as you set targets for growth over the next 12 months.
You can see that the BGC includes all of the Seven Keys on the left hand side, though in a slightly different order, because Referrals has moved up the order a bit. The calculator also includes information about existing customers, which we haven’t included in the formula thus far.
There are three columns on the right, but let’s start with the first one labelled Current. In this column you should enter figures that reflect the current situation in your business, i.e. the sales and profits that you are achieving right now and expect to achieve this year. Or you can use figures for the last 12 months of your business.
The next column is labelled Target Increase: this is your SKF % target for each Key. It’s here that you will enter some goals to aim for over the next 12 months. You can start by using 10% as per the illustration in Chapter 3, but I want you to go away and develop more specific goals for each of the Keys, based on the circumstances of your business and the opportunities you can identify.
Once you’ve done that, the final column shows the impact on your business of achieving these targets.
Now, it is sometimes easier to start at the bottom of the table. You (hopefully) know what your Revenue and Profit figures were for last year, so enter those in and work backwards. It’s OK at this point if the figures are not completely accurate, or are the result of some degree of guesswork.
As I said before, the aim is to illustrate the impact of implementing the Seven Keys Formula in your business, and also to encourage you to start thinking about where the best opportunities are for growth.
The targets that you set in the BGC will form the basis for measuring your progress over the next year, so try to be specific about each Key. But if you're struggling to find realistic percentages, don’t worry. As you read through the remaining chapters of this book, you’ll get a better idea of the strategies you can use to improve each key and you should be able to translate that into pounds and pence (or dollars, Euros, Rand or Yuan, depending on where you’re based).
To download an electronic copy of the Business Growth Calculator, simply sign up for the free introductory module of my online course.
Click here for more details. It’s free and no credit card is required.