Business Planning Planning Your Business Growth Tip! One of the best methods for getting the business planning help that you need is to contact an attorney. Yes, this may be more expensive, but when it comes to setting up and running your business, having someone with a legal edge to it may make it go much more smoothly. The desire of every business is to grow and prosper. After all, if your business does not progress and expand, sales and profits will remain stagnant and costs will continue to rise. Competition will grow and you will not, that pretty much details what you need to do, and that is GROW!! The question is, are you absolutely sure that you are ready to grow? In other words, do you have the capacity to grow and suffer the consequences if you're not? Consequences? What? That's right, the consequences of growing. Otherwise known as growing pains. Businesses have them just like we do. Whenever we grow into something different or progress to a new level, we experience pains that accompany growing into the new situation or environment. Many businesses outline a great plan that includes long-term plans, but fail to prepare for growth rates. The rate of growth can hamper your ability to meet the needs of the customers requesting your product or service. When this happens, it is just as disastrous as a lost sale. You see, when you cannot meet the demand, your overall business reputation suffers. When preparing your business and outlining your plan to provide customers with your product or service, you must consider your ability to meet the needs of the customer in the future as well as now. When you outline your plan and detail your sales forecast, you must remember that more sales means more time, supplies, overhead, equipment and many other details that come with growth. Especially rapid growth. If you have a product or service that is in great demand, you need to be aware of capacity even more so. The fine line between being prepared for growth and going to extremes comes into play when bridging this gap. You as a business owner and operator must plan extremely well without wasting precious startup capital. So what do you? Well fortunately, we have encountered and seen enough of this situation in the combined 35 years of business experience to provide our readers with some tips that can help you overcome the growing pains that are experienced with rapid or unexpected growth. Tip! In conclusion it is apparent that the Six Sigma methodology can be applied to the business planning process to help to make what, at times, appears to be a daunting mountain into a number of smaller hills that can be easily overcome. Perform detailed advanced planning with the suppliers of equipment, services, supplies and other sources that can affect the output of your business. When you plan ahead with all of the sources that affect output, you are preparing yourself and the suppliers, giving you and them an edge when attempting to supply over and above the expected requirements. Conserve whenever possible. This not only includes capital, but everything else as well. All of the equipment, supplies and overhead should kept to a minimum in usage when operating your business. Your plan should include this from the onset. The old saying of "waste not want not" comes into play on this item. Every resource that conserved now is a possible resource to be used when absolutely needed. Tip! I suggest thinking of business planning like planning a vacation. (Your plan should, of course, include a vacation. Minimize your throughput hours. By this I mean that the overall time it takes you to process all the inputs into the saleable products or services is overall throughput. The costs, time and materials associated with that throughput must be kept at a minimum at all times. Every hour saved is an hour that can be put to profitable use. Maximizing your effort is the final key to preparing for growth. Your output is a result of the inputs you and your partners or employees put in. When planning and operating your business you must detail and control the activities that affect your productivity. When you do this, you maximize your efforts and afford yourself the greatest opportunity for return on the investment, whether it is time, material, or services. All of these key elements, although seemingly insignificant to overall growth capacity, can and do affect your output. Maximizing your efforts and remaining efficient along with planning in the advanced stages of business startup will help you control your business to a point that it allows you to better foresee and plan for growth while having the ability to do it in a profitable manner. Tip! Although, it is equally important to recognise that business planning should not get in front of the data available. That is, if the data available is only at the high level, the planning regrettably must be at high level. Article written by Douglas R. Lukas, owner and CEO of Business-Bytes, an online business improvement website, http://www.business-bytes.com. Reprint rights granted with inclusion of this resource box.