If you are growing a business with the intention of selling, then you are in the right place.

The first article in this series discussed how to get the foundations right.

Now, we consider how to prepare a growth plan that transforms your business into an asset that’s attractive to investors.

• You might also like: How to write a growth plan like a scale-up business.

Vistage speaker Balaji Krishnamurthy sometimes describes growing a business as a task that requires ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ work. 

So what does this mean? Hard tasks are those you generally associated with growing a business – managing finances, setting the right organisational structure and introducing the right processes or systems. 

The soft tasks are the more human, intuitive challenges – creating a strong brand, defining the company culture and looking after the wellbeing of your people.

The American poet, Bill Copeland, once said, ‘The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score’. Needless to say, he wasn’t talking about football.

Defined as a business with an average annualised return of at least 20% in the last three years - and with a minimum of 10 employees at the start of the period - scaleup businesses are those that demonstrate amazing levels of growth. According to the ScaleUp Institute’s Annual Scaleup Review 2018, the UK is now home to around 35,000 such businesses, contributing hugely to its economic growth and productivity.

Every day, people upload 4 million hours of content to YouTube, bloggers, businesses and brands publish 2 million blog posts, and the chattering masses fire out over six hundred fifty-six million tweets. The internet is a busy place.

Physical fatigue is easy to spot. You feel it in your bones, you see it in the mirror. Your body aches, you’re exhausted, and you just want to stop and lie down. Other types of fatigue are less easy to detect but can be just as debilitating - and these include decision fatigue.

In many aspects of life, it helps to follow the instructions. That pile of planks, poles and allen keys isn’t going to make a wardrobe unless you know how it all fits together. Instructions give you a process by which to achieve your vision - and helps it stand up when you put it into practice.

With another dramatic World Cup still fresh in our minds, what better time to explore the nuanced world of international business?

When Google launched in the late nineties, it was a simple search engine designed to make the internet easier to navigate. In 2016, Google is unapologetically an ad platform, with the Adwords pay-per-click (PPC) service generating a whopping 97% of its $73 billion sales in 2015.

For many businesses, PPC is an addiction; their sole means of generating web referrals, because they’ve turned off all other marketing activities.

It’s a risky game to play. While PPC is certainly making Google a lot of money, it doesn’t work well for all businesses. Cost-per-click may be as low as £0.04 in some areas, but the highest ranking keywords – those which attract the highest number of searches and clicks – can command fees in excess of £35. So, while PPC definitely can work for some, it can be an ineffective, expensive drain on resources for others.

Which leads to the question, when should a business adopt PPC, and when should they leave it well alone?

Managing an SME is exciting. Any business owner knows that the process involves ups and downs, but whatever stage you've reached, with good judgement and a little luck, you'll hopefully reach a point where you’ve got an established a foothold in the market.