These are the things that will limit your growth over the next one to five years, depending. While these will likely be a bit more difficult to solve in a quarter or a year’s time, understanding their significance and working towards making progress on these factors will ultimately help you scale faster and with less resistance. Getting clear on your long-term limiting factors gives you insights into the capabilities that you’ll likely need to develop over the next few years to address those issues. Developing capabilities often takes time, which is why it is imperative that you identify limiting factors early on.
As a business owner, you make decisions every day, and they won’t all be good ones. Some will waste energy and resources (like your time, focus, money, or customer’s attention) and ultimately end up causing more harm than good.
All too often, business owners get so caught up in the day-to-day adrenaline of running their business that they forget to step back and think through their strategic decisions. So, when you begin your strategic planning, take some time to go over your key strategic decisions and decide whether they were or are the right ones for your business at this juncture. It is much easier to pivot than to try to dig yourself out of a hole years down the road.
Once you have a good handle on your short-term and long-term limiting factors and review your current strategic decisions, you should be in a good place to start planning out the year ahead. Write out the three main objectives that you would like to accomplish by year’s end, and then break it down into quarters to make it easier for you and your team to achieve your goals.