While achieving fast growth is the holy grail of most businesses, not many manage to achieve, yet alone sustain it. The reasons are varied but the result is the same – null to low two-digit annual growth. This article will explain how to get your business to escape gravity.

Do you have a growth plan? Does it work? Chances are that the answers are no to one of these questions. If you don’t have a plan, it obviously doesn’t work… If you do and it doesn’t, the hint is in the word “plan”. It’s all very nice making plans but as Mike Tyson said, “everyone’s got a plan until they get punch in the mouth”.

To achieve and maintain fast growth you need a process. It will start with a plan but will be tested in the implementation.

Hereunder are the principles and stages of a process that will help you achieve and sustain rapid growth:

1. Don’t do it alone – if you have a team, involve them. They will be the ones implementing it, and if they are excluded from planning, they will not be engaged. You will get the additional benefit of a motivated and committed team.

2. Start with the “Why?” – Just as you don’t go on a journey without knowing where you are going, you can’t plan your growth without knowing what your Ultimate Goal. It can be 5 or 25 years from now – it doesn’t matter because you are not going to plan the entire route (see point 5 below) – so long as you can visualise it.

3. Culture eats strategy for breakfast – culture is based on prevailing values. Some think that talking about values is a waste of time. WRONG! Finding out, committing, and living up to your team’s common values is important not only for the feelgood factor. Businesses with clear value-sets make faster and better decisions, and fewer mistakes. There is enough empirical evidence to show that.

4. Reset your GPS – continuing with the journey analogy from point 2 above, just as your GPS will pinpoint where you currently are before planning the route, you need to as well. A SWOT analysis is a good way of doing that.

5. Focus on the 80:20 – based on your current position and SWOT analysis, identify a handful of powerful and fast-acting activities that will take you one step closer to your Ultimate Goal from point 2 above. Don’t stretch yourself – you have the day to day to run, so focus on the true game-changers and limit it to the next 12 months. The world is too dynamic to plan for longer; assign a leader to each activity.

6. Break it down and follow it up – this is the most crucial part, and why most plans fail. Break down every action you have decided on in the previous step to quarterly goals, and then to weekly tasks, and start completing these tasks immediately to create momentum. Each leader will have a weekly meeting with the team supporting them to review the previous week’s tasks and plan the next week’s. Use a project-management tool to control the implementation and review the entire plan every month.

7. Rinse and repeat – since the practical plan is limited to 12 months, after a year you need to repeat the process (at least from point 4 onwards), based on the circumstances at that time.

This process has been practiced in multiple organisations with great success, achieving as much as 100% annual growth 4 years in a row. There is no reason why you shouldn’t.