Our Growth Vision Workshop runs from 10am to 4pm at our Bellshill office. It's designed to take you away from the usual distractions, giving you the space to think about the future rather than the work waiting for you that day.
Taking a full day away from your business is a significant commitment, so you’ll want to know how that time will be spent.
Our Growth Vision Workshop runs from 10am to 4pm at our Bellshill office, with an hour’s break for lunch. That gives us five hours to work through what you want from the business and develop a plan for its next 3 years.
It’s a working conversation rather than a presentation. We take you through a series of exercises that build into a 3 year vision and a plan for beginning to work towards it.
Holding it in person also takes you away from the usual distractions, giving you the space to think about the future rather than the work waiting for you that day.
The exact conversation will depend on your business, but this is how the day is structured.
Before the workshop: a few prompts to get you thinking
You don’t need to prepare figures, reports or any other documents. You won’t need to arrive with a finished business plan either.
We’ll send you some prompts beforehand about what you want from the business and where you would like to be in 3 years. They’re designed to get you thinking before the workshop, but the planning happens during the day itself.
10am: Understanding the business you have today
We begin with an open conversation about the business and why you started it.
We’ll look at what you sell and the clients you want to work with, along with what makes the business different. We’ll also discuss how it currently generates revenue and how the team may need to develop as it grows.
If more than one owner attends, this gives us an opportunity to check that you’re working towards the same kind of business. That includes whether you want to build something you may eventually sell or create a business that supports a particular lifestyle.
This gives us the context we need for the rest of the day.
Defining your business values
We’ll begin thinking about the values that should guide the business as it develops.
This isn’t about trying to perfect a set of words during the workshop. We use examples from your experience to identify what’s important to you and what you would never compromise to win work.
You’ll create a first draft of the principles you want the business to follow. You can then develop these properly with your team after the workshop, including what each value should mean in practice.
Creating your 3 year vision
We then look at the business you want to own in 3 years.
We start with what success would mean to you personally and how you would like your life to compare with today. From there, we build a more specific picture of the business required to support it.
That vision considers the clients you want the business to serve and the work you want it to provide. It also looks at your future role as the owner, including how much time you want to spend working and what you would like to have delegated.
You might not have an exact answer for everything yet, so we’ll use estimates or ranges where needed. That gives us something realistic to work back from.
Building your 3 year financial roadmap
Once we know what you want the business to look like, we put some high-level figures behind it.
We consider the revenue and profit it may need to generate over the next 3 years, including what it would need to pay you. We then look at whether reaching those figures is mainly about serving more clients or improving the fees and margins generated by the work.
This allows us to consider what the plan could mean for the team and identify the biggest assumptions or risks behind it.
The result is a high-level roadmap rather than a detailed budget or cash flow forecast. If you need more detailed personal financial planning, we can introduce you to an independent financial adviser.
Lunch
We stop for a one-hour lunch break before moving into the afternoon exercises.
Reviewing Exit Readiness or Building Value
If your business has enough trading history, we’ll review how prepared it would be if you wanted to step back or sell it one day.
The Exit Readiness exercise looks at how dependent the business is on you and whether its income is predictable. It also considers whether the team could continue serving clients without your direct involvement.
We’ll review how well the business’s processes are documented and whether its financial records are accurate and up to date. Each area is scored to show where the business is strongest and what may need attention.
If the business is too new for a meaningful Exit Readiness assessment, we’ll complete the Building Value exercise instead. This considers how you can begin building a business that is less dependent on its founders, with stronger systems and more predictable income.
The discussion is designed to identify two or three ideas to start working on, rather than assessing a business that doesn’t yet have enough trading history.
Completing your Owner’s Check-In
We then return to the life and role you described in your 3 year vision.
The Owner’s Check-In looks at whether the way you currently run the business is moving you towards that vision. We’ll discuss how you spend your time and what you may need to stop doing as the business develops.
The exercise also considers how sustainable your current pace is and if you’re maintaining the boundaries that are important to you, such as holidays or days away from work.
Finally, we’ll look at whether you need to develop any new skills to lead the business you have described.
We cover the main points during the workshop, but you can return to the full exercise afterwards and use it as an annual check against your vision.
Choosing your strategic priorities
The final part of the day connects everything we’ve discussed.
We compare the business as it operates today with the 3 year vision and identify the areas that could make the biggest difference over the next 12 months.
For each priority, we’ll agree what you want to have achieved by the end of the year. We’ll then identify the first actions to take over the next 90 days, who will be responsible for them and when they should be completed.
This plan is built with you before you leave, so you finish the workshop knowing where to begin.
4pm: What you take away
By the end of the workshop, you’ll have:
- A written 3 year vision
- A high-level financial roadmap
- An Exit Readiness assessment or Building Value review
- The main actions from your Owner’s Check-In
- Strategic priorities for the next 12 months
- A 90 day plan showing the first actions to take
We’ll pull together the notes from the day so you have something you can return to afterwards.
The workshop is available as a standalone service, so you can use what you’ve developed whether or not you decide to work with Benson Wood afterwards.
Book your Growth Vision Workshop in Bellshill
The Growth Vision Workshop is currently available at an introductory price of £495 + VAT. You can attend alone or with your director team.
If you’d like to spend a day working through where you want your business to go and how you could get there, get in touch.
