Building Your Business Growth Road Map is highly recommended in any business situation. This could for business growth, pivoting, or sustainability. William Hurley said this about ideas. Ideas are cheap, It is building them into profitable companies that is hard ideas. I like insects. Many are born, but few live to maturity.

In this week’s episode of ‘l Hate Numbers’ I talk about the why, the what and the how of building your own business growth map.

Why a Business Growth Road Map?

Your business road map, a plan under any other name is invaluable and gives you

• Accountability
• Plans minimise risk
• They give you direction
• Focus becomes a watchword
• Easier to achieve your objectives

Don’t delude yourself into thinking that what’s in your head is good enough, not having a road map means that you're forever chasing your tail.

What is in Your Business Road Map?

Your business road map converts your ideas into something more meaningful. The purpose is to get you to your end destination, the destination that you choose.

How do to build and use Your Business Road Map?

Brain dumps are the start part of the process. Imagine tipping out the ideas and thoughts in your brain, however chaotic, however unstructured. That is the start of the process, you can use that brain dump to generate content.

Your business road map includes several elements.

• Your mission, your reasons for being
• End destination, your Northern Star where you want to end up
• Measures to monitor your progress
• Customers: Doing a 360-degree audit of your client base
• Your They can't be, and shouldn’t be avoided
• The vital ingredient to make your road map come to life and be achievable

You need perseverance and tenacity. There is going to be time just when it's going to be quite lonely. It doesn't feel to be working. And there's going to be times of elation.

It is not easy achieving business growth. It's like turning up at the gym and hoping those abs will just appear.

What Next

Grab a coffee, make yourself comfortable, sit back and listen. If you want to join out business growth club then click the link to find out more.

I love doing this podcast and sharing my love of Numbers with you. Check out the link to subscribe and do not miss an episode. Help me spread that Number Love by downloading it, listening, and acting!

In This Episode

• Understanding why you need a Business Growth Road Map
• Knowing what your Business Growth Road Map contains
• How to build your Business Growth Road Map
• Looking at Numbers and Leadership
• Developing your own Numbers confidence and decisions
• Take more control of your numbers to help make you money, survive and thrive

Links

https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast/id1500471288

https://play.google.com/music/m/I3pvpztpjvjw6yrw2kctmtyckam?t=I_Hate_Numbers

https://open.spotify.com/show/5lKjqgbYaxnIAoTeK0zins

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/I-Hate-Numbers-p1298505/

Get in touch with us to find out more about the Business Growth Club.  For more business and finance, news, advice and tips, don’t forget to watch our weekly broadcasts.

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Hi, folks, and welcome to episode number 20 of I Hate Numbers. I can't believe that Episode 20 already. This show is part of my mission to help you and your business get closer to your numbers. It's important so your business can make money, survive, and thrive. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about building and using a route map to grow your business.

We're going to be talking about the why, the what, and the how. When it comes to the why, why do we need a road map? Surely, we've got it all in our heads. We've got a pretty good idea where we want our businesses to go, how we're going to get there, then you are deluding yourself. Keeping everything in your head will lead your brain to fill in the gaps.

You don't have any accountability, and with our very fast-paced lives as such, they're not having something documented, not having a route map means that you're forever going to be chasing your tail. Ask yourself this question, what does having a successful business mean to you? Now, it's a pretty important question to ask yourself when you're starting

because if you don't know where you want to go, it's going to be very difficult to figure out how you get there. Business growth doesn't just happen organically. It doesn't happen by miracles or by magic. It takes time, it takes effort, and it takes commitment, and it always starts with a plan. I won't deny it.

I'm a big lover of planning. I'm a big lover of plans because they minimise risk. They give you a direction, they give you a focus, they make you accountable, and it means that the accomplishment of whatever your business growth objectives are, they're going to be much easier to achieve as a result. Most of us in business want to make a mark.

We want to make an impact with our businesses and whatever your company's remit, whether you're a private business, whether you're a public-benefit remit, you want to have a meaningful impact on your clients, yourself, and to do that, you need to make money. And only with money can you grow, can you scale, can you have the impact,

and can you have the lifestyle that you deserve. What does this route map actually consist of? What is it? Well, the route map is essentially converting your ideas into something more meaningful to get you to the end destination, whatever that destination is that you choose. William Hurley, science-fiction writer, programmer, web strategist, and software developer said this about ideas.

Ideas are cheap. It is building them into profitable companies that is hard. Ideas are like insects. Many are born, but few live to maturity. We've talked about the why. We've talked about the what of building a business route map. Let's focus now for the rest of this podcast on the how. How do we actually go about building our route map to growth, our route map to success, and our route map to making money

in our business. Your business-growth route map is not necessarily just for growing your existing business. It could be because you decided to pivot, launch a new product, diversify into a different marketplace, develop a new audience base. Anything that talks in terms of the future, a direction of travel is nicely summarised and captured in a business plan, a business route map.

This business route map should include a number of elements. From the very beginning, you need to think about your mission, your reason for being. Who are you? What do you want to achieve? Why do you actually exist in the world? What is it your business is trying to do? And you need to gain some degree of clarity and focus that will form the underlying foundations of your route map.

Everybody has a different view of the world. Everybody has a different view and perspective as to what their goals are, so your goals will not be the same as your competitor, somebody in a rival industry. A great tool, a great technique for sifting through all the many ideas, to think about what your goals are is to have a brain dump.

Now, that sounds very dramatic here, but a brain dump is as it implies. Whatever's in your head, literally, just dump it onto a sheet of paper. If you refer to technology, put it onto a Word document or something similar. And at that stage, it's really key and important when you do a brain dump is that you must not exercise any filters.

You must not dump what's in your brain, however chaotic, however unstructured, however bizarre it may feel, and say that's not going to be good enough. It's all about freedom and just get it down onto a piece of paper. Do not select, do not limit, do not kick things out at that stage. Dump it down. Get it out from inside your head into something that you can look at.

Relax. Go away. Come back to it later on, and then that's when the filtering can start. This is going to really be essential to develop an executable business plan and essential for growing your business. Other key elements that will go into this route map is to think about end destination, and that end destination says where is it you want to end up, whether that's in a 12-month cycle, 24 months, or 36.

If that seems too far away for you, by all means, cut it down to a shorter time frame. Typically though, as a rule of thumb, a 12-month destination point is good working practice. Once you know the direction you are traveling in, then you can set measures to monitor your progress. Think about what you want to achieve. What will be the signs that tell you you are progressing on the right path?

Think about this like the satnav in your vehicle that will monitor your route that you are making and indicators, measures of success, measures of progress, also keep you accountable and make sure that you are heading in the right direction. Measures are important. They need to be a mix of the observation.

They need to be a mixture of the number type. If I set myself a target in 12-months time that I want to lose a certain amount of weight, let's say for argument’s sake, a stone. Well, that 14-pounds worth of weight, I might break that down into monthly cycles. And I might say I'm targeting to have a weight reduction of, say, of a pound per month.

And then in the last few months here, I can increase that to get to my target weight reduction. Now, the numbers aren't necessarily there to say they've got to be this size or the other size here. If I'm not meeting my targets, then I can do something about them. That's the raw numerical measures. Well, the other softer measures might be whether I can get into certain clothing,

what I actually feel like personally speaking. If I can mix that up here, then I can actually use that to motivate myself as opposed to beating myself up for not achieving that. If you have no customers, you have no business. That sounds very cliche, but very true. Business growth requires a customer focus.

Doing a 360-degree audit of your client base, what their needs are, and how you can respond is an important part of the planning process. Once you understand your customer properly, you can make a plan to communicate and connect with them accordingly. And remember, it's not about you show, but it's about what they want. What's their pains? What's their problems? What are their needs that you are looking to solve?

Most entrepreneurs, most business owners really want to make a difference and help customers. Don't lose sight of that in your business. Numbers can't be avoided and numbers shouldn't be avoided. Many new business owners, many existing business owners will disconnect with their numbers. Numbers are your best friend in business.

They won't lie to you. They'll give you the start reality of what your activity currently and plan is doing for your bottom line. How much profit are you making? Which customers are making you money? Which customers are losing you money? What's the cost of doing things? And vital to looking at the cash flow in your business.

Cash flow is the vital ingredient that's going to oil the wheels to business growth. You need to keep an eye on what's coming in, what's going out. You need to have good systems, good processes, and however worthy or wonderful your business plans are, if you haven't got the money to keep that going, if you don't make money from that, then you are effectively wasting your time and energies.

Let's recap what's been said so far. We've talked about the why. Why we need a business plan? We've talked about the accountability. We've talked about building a route map, which helps you get from your starting point to your destination point. We've talked about it making you accountable. We've looked at customer focus to grow your business, doing a 360-degree audit of your client base.

Remember, we're there to serve our clients. We're not there on an ego trip. It's not about us, and largely, customers don't really care about us. They just want to know what we can do to help them make their pain disappear, their business problems dissipate. What can we do to communicate and to help them with that?

What's the last piece of the jigsaw? What's the last vital ingredient to make this route map come to life and to make it achieve what you set it out to achieve? Well, it comes down predominantly to you as a business owner, as a business leader. You need to be ready to steer your business in the direction of growth.

There are going to be times when things don't go as well as you hoped. I know for myself, going back 25 plus years ago when I started on my own business journey in my back bedroom, I was busy hustling, keeping down other part-time jobs. I made some mistakes in my business. I lost money. From my back bedroom though,

I was determined and tenacious enough to want to know to move out that back bedroom and to make something with more impact. I've done that after 25 years. Did I have a business plan that I'm recommending to you now, a route map? In my head, mostly. Some of it was scribbled down, so as a result of making those mistakes, I can speak with a greater degree of confidence

when I put this idea of a route map to you. You've got to have in your head perseverance, tenacity. There's going to be times when it's going to be quite low, it doesn't feel to be working, and there's going to be times of elation, that legal dopamine that you get when you make a sale. It's not easy to achieve business growth.

It's not a question of just turning up at the gym and hoping those abs will appear. It's about sweats being put in to get to that equity. You've got to make time. You've got to make commitment to take the action and focusing on achieving your business goals. Well, folks, I hope you've got some value out of this episode.

If you are ready to level up and accelerate your business growth, check out the show notes at the end. There's some links here to the resources that's going to help power you onto that journey. Love your reviews on the show. Feedback, listen, and share. Until next week, have a great week. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show.

We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.