Prolific Thoughts

What’s a Strategic Growth Plan?

You’re in a place many business leaders have found themselves in before. You’re stuck. Your growth is incremental when it should be exponential. You’ve been doing the same things with the same results for too many years. You have an incredible vision for your organization, but your performance is lagging. You’re tired of being your industry’s best-kept secret. Strategic Growth Plans change all of those paradigms.

Strategic Growth Plans are a part of our growth strategy practice. They are a robust guiding document that captures your five-year vision and turns it into an actionable plan for aggressive gains in the metrics that matter most to your organization. You dream big and cast your vision. We listen intently, dream alongside you, and begin to discover ways to maximize your revenue, relevancy, and impact.

What a Strategic Growth Plan is Not
  • A 40-slide PowerPoint presentation that sits in your files, unopened for months
  • Research from the first 20 results on Google
  • A one-size-fits-all templated plan
  • Made for one person in your organization to utilize
  • Rigid, strict, not flexible as business changes
What a Strategic Growth Plan Is
  • A detailed five-year plan focused on exponential growth
  • Extensive research on you, your industry, and your competitors
  • Custom to your business
  • Accessible to anyone who needs it
  • Flexible, ebbs and flows as your business continues to grow and change
  • Includes strategies that are affordable and responsible

A typical Strategic Growth Plan takes six months to craft, write, and deliver and has six different steps to complete. It’s a pretty easy timeline to remember: six months + six steps = a future of success.

The Six Steps of a Strategic Growth Plan
  1. 1) Immersion
  2. 2) Research
  3. 3) Strategy Development
  4. 4) Tie Backs
  5. 5) Delivery + Presentation
  6. 6) Implementation + Execution (Optional)
1) Immersion

Prolific Immersions are 2-3 day discovery meetings with you and the most important shareholders from your team. We ask questions, conduct workshops, and facilitate discussions to understand your team dynamic, your overall company goals, and growth expectations, both immediate and long-term. From our experience, the most successful Immersions happen when both parties share boldly and freely.

2) Research

Our research aims to do three main things: find insights hiding in plain sight, answer questions you’ve been wrestling with for a long time, and tell you things you didn’t already know. We occasionally engage with our Growth Network to help us conduct further research if needed. Conducting exhaustive, sound research is crucial for our strategists to make successful recommendations for growth strategies.

3) Strategy Development

Strategy development is typically the halfway point in our process – and where the real magic happens. Once we have thoroughly reviewed our notes and takeaways from the immersion and conducted our research, strategy development begins. Prolific’s strategy team handcrafts each strategy and recommends action items based on research, your business’ financials, and your team’s capability to complete them. Each strategy is carefully aligned with a goal in your organization to further your growth. When strategy development is complete, we pause, check-in, and present them in their totality before continuing with the Strategic Growth Plan process.

4) Tie Backs

Tiebacks are exactly what they sound like – we ensure every strategy is affordable and achievable, that someone will be responsible for them, and have a timing and action plan of when and how to complete it over the course of five years. This is where most consultants stop and where we are just getting started.

We collaborate with your CFO to determine how each strategy will be affordable and financially responsible relative to your organization’s financial position. We will never suggest a strategy that’s too expensive.

Each strategy requires an internal champion. Who will be in charge of overseeing the strategy to completion and measuring its success? Different leaders are often selected to lead different strategies that align with their departments, department goals, and general area of expertise. It’s impossible for just one person to be the pinnacle of success for a Strategic Growth Plan – it is a team, and all-company, effort.

Strategy champions are never left hanging with just the tactics and affordability plan: our tiebacks include a timing + action plan that maps out when each strategy should begin, when progress should be made, and when it should be completed.

With a clear path to affording the strategy, a leader in championing it, and a mapped-out timing + action, each strategy sets you up for lasting success. It’s as easy as one, two, three.

5) Delivery + Presentation

We don’t just conduct research, develop strategies, and send it to you tied in a bow to go on your merry way. We schedule a time to go through every page of this robust delivery. We review and answer any questions you may have on our research, strategies, or implementation tactics. You can also opt to have an executive summary review for a bite-sized delivery.

6) Implementation + Execution (Optional)

Our SGP’s are specifically designed to be implemented on your own, without a partner. While implementation + execution of your Strategic Growth Plan is not typically included in our partnership’s first phase, many of our partners engage us to implement and measure their plans’ success. What better partner than the one who knows your business inside and out?


Prolific has helped hundreds of partners across the world grow exponentially through growth strategy, growth capital, and growth performance. If you’re interested in learning more about Prolific, go to Growth Practices, see our Success Stories, or tell us about your growth metric.