Leveraging GrowthWheel to Develop Your Business Idea

The Meaning of Life – In the Business

When crafting your mission, remember making money is not a mission. Rather than focusing on money, your mission should explain your purpose and describe what you do, who you serve, how you do it, and why. It should be appealing and forceful. Many entrepreneurs find the mission to become a driving force and inspiration for business development.

Actions Make a Difference

The ability to act is what makes a difference between success and failure. For a successful business, you not only need a great idea but also the ability to carry out that great idea. One of the most important things is to identify the problems that need to be solved first.

GrowthWheel defines seven action steps that can take the business to the next level.

• Ideation
• Research
• Decision-making
• Sparring
• Testing
• Documentation
• Presentation

All seven stages are important, but there is no specific order. The seven stages will help with inspiration, create structure, inspire creativity, and caution of common pitfalls.

An Alternative to the Business Plan

In 2005, GrowthWheel was founded based on the idea that there had to be an alternative to the conventional business plan as well as a better way to support action planning and decision making.

According to the Action Planning – Goodbye Business Plan, there are three major problems with the traditional business plan:

• Area of focus
• Time wastage
• Perceived need.

GrowthWheel provides an alternative to the business plan, provides a map, focuses on starting a business, and highlights actions that will really make a difference to the business. 

7 Different Ways to Grow & Develop Your Businesses

Businesses cannot afford to stand still. Even though you may want to grow and develop your business, your goal may not be to grow big. Perhaps, rather than growing big in terms of volume, you want your business to be the best in the field and would want to focus on quality growth.

For business owners, there are seven alternative growth scenarios:

1. Income growth
2. Financial growth
3. Volume growth
4. Product growth
5. Quality growth
6. Network growth
7. Market growth

Depending on your business goals, you can choose and prioritize different growth scenarios.

Anticipate Your Next Growth Challenge

As your business grows, it will move through the life cycle of business development:

• Pre-start
• Startup
• Pre-growth
• Growth
• Ripening
• Transition.

Each of these stages are associated with common challenges. The life cycle can provide clarification of which challenges are over and help predict challenges ahead. Also, you can learn how other entrepreneurs have overcome similar growth challenges.