EDG Grant Business Strategy: Build a Growth Plan Your Team Can Use

Choose the decision the strategy project must resolve

Frame the project around a question management needs to answer. Should the business deepen its position in one customer segment or enter another? Should it offer a standardised service or continue accepting highly customised work? Which capabilities would allow it to compete on something other than price? A specific decision creates a useful boundary for research and analysis.

Explain why the decision matters now. The trigger might be margin pressure, changing customer expectations, capacity constraints or dependence on a small number of accounts. Describe the evidence available and the uncertainty that remains. Avoid treating a broad ambition such as doubling revenue as a strategy; it is an outcome target that still needs an underlying set of choices.

Agree what the project will not decide. A company can examine its route to growth without resolving every operational policy. This focus protects management attention and allows the consultant to gather relevant evidence. At the end of the work, the leadership team should be able to state the chosen direction, the alternatives rejected and the reasons for the decision.

Understand where the business creates and loses value

Analyse the current business at a level that supports decisions. Company-wide revenue and profit can conceal major differences between customer groups, services, channels or order types. Where records allow, examine contribution, repeat purchasing, delivery effort, payment behaviour and capacity usage. Make the limitations visible if the data is incomplete.

Talk to staff who handle exceptions. Sales, operations and finance often see different parts of the same problem. A customer that appears attractive in a sales report may require frequent urgent deliveries or extensive unpaid support. Conversely, a modest account may be reliable, easy to serve and a good fit for the company's capabilities.

Use these findings to identify strengths that can be repeated and weaknesses that constrain growth. Avoid a long list of generic advantages such as quality service or experienced staff. Explain how a strength affects customer choice or delivery economics. For an illustrative specialist supplier, technical response speed might reduce customer downtime; that is more strategically useful than simply saying the company has knowledgeable employees.

Research customers and competitors to test your assumptions

Define the customer group before collecting opinions. Separate existing customers, lost opportunities and potential buyers with different needs. Ask about the problem they are trying to solve, how they choose providers, what alternatives they consider and what makes a purchase difficult. Questions about actual decisions are more useful than asking whether somebody likes an idea.

Combine interviews with available commercial evidence. Review enquiry patterns, reasons for lost quotations, repeat-order behaviour and service complaints. Treat a small number of interviews as directional evidence rather than a statistically representative market survey. Record where the evidence agrees, where it conflicts and which important assumption remains untested.

Competitor analysis should examine how competitors create value: their target buyers, offer structure, delivery model, channels and apparent trade-offs. Copying another company's website language does not create a strategy. Look for a position your business can credibly occupy, supported by capabilities customers value. A rival may have a wider range, while your opportunity lies in a narrower specialism delivered with greater reliability.

Compare genuine options using economics and capability

Develop a small set of distinct choices. An option should describe the target customer, the proposition, the route to market and the capabilities required. If every option is simply the same plan with a different marketing budget, the team has not yet explored a meaningful strategic choice.

Test each option against commercial assumptions. Estimate the customer opportunity, typical transaction value, cost to acquire and serve, capacity needed and time to establish a position. Use ranges where evidence is weak. Show which assumptions matter most to the outcome and what evidence would change management's view. Avoid presenting an attractive forecast without explaining the effort and cost required to achieve it.

Also test organisational fit. A high-service proposition requires responsive people and operating discipline. A lower-cost offer requires a model that can deliver efficiently. A new market may require capabilities the company cannot build quickly. The preferred option should explain both the opportunity and the changes needed to pursue it. Sometimes the sound choice is to strengthen an existing position before adding another growth initiative.

Turn the preferred strategy into an executable roadmap

Translate the chosen direction into a sequence of initiatives. Give each an owner, intended result, dependency and review point. Distinguish work that can begin through ordinary management preparation from work that requires a separate investment or grant application. The strategy should guide those later projects without assuming they are all covered by the strategy activity itself.

Use early milestones to test critical assumptions. For an illustrative service company targeting a specialised customer segment, an early milestone might be validating the proposed service package with suitable buyers. A later milestone could establish delivery capacity before scaling acquisition. This sequence reduces the risk of committing to expansion before the operating model is ready.

Include a stop or revise decision where uncertainty is material. A roadmap should allow management to respond to evidence, rather than making every stage inevitable. Define who can change priorities and how the decision will be recorded. An annual strategy presentation is insufficient if nobody owns the next month of work. The roadmap should connect long-term direction with the practical choices managers face each week.

Understand the current EDGE Business Strategic Planning scope

For new applications, EDGE Business Strategic Planning is the current activity to examine. It supports professional services for the relevant strategy work, with support up to 50% for SMEs and 30% for non-SMEs, subject to assessment and the shared cap. The activity provides a 12-month completion period from approval and requires the relevant SS 680 consultant certification.

The required report addresses the business internally, its external environment, growth choices and implementation recommendations. Regulatory compliance expenses, updates to standard operating procedures and GST are excluded. Check the complete current activity conditions before treating a proposed consultancy package as eligible. A strategy label does not make routine administrative work supportable.

Application preparation also includes projections for revenue growth and new jobs with gross monthly salaries above S$5,000 in the year after completion, distinguishing overall and Singaporean jobs. Develop these from credible assumptions and the actual business plan. Do not invent hiring commitments or optimistic growth merely because a field asks for a projection. If the strategy could improve resilience or profitability without major headcount growth, explain its actual expected impact accurately.

Keep the strategy alive after the final report

At handover, ask management to explain the strategy in its own words. The team should be able to identify the target customer, the value proposition, the capabilities being built and the activities being deprioritised. If the explanation depends on the consultant's presentation, the plan may not yet be sufficiently clear or owned.

Establish a regular review using a small set of leading and outcome measures. Leading measures might show progress in validating an offer, building capability or reaching suitable buyers. Outcome measures could include customer retention, contribution or growth in the chosen segment. Select measures that test the strategy's logic rather than reporting activity for its own sake.

Record decisions and update assumptions as evidence changes. A strategy review should ask whether the chosen approach is working and what management needs to adjust. Keep the roadmap connected to budgets and staff responsibilities. The final report provides a foundation, but the real capability is the company's ability to make coherent decisions, learn from results and allocate resources with a clear sense of direction.

Frequently asked questions