Strategic growth planning aligned with transparency

Growth isn't simply about increasing productivity or boosting sales or service marketing. Growth is about improving processes, gathering information, and structuring a plan to ensure healthy growth for both the company and its employees. Data shows that uncontrolled, unplanned growth can substantially affect a company's integrity, leading to uncontrolled spending, high employee turnover, and damage to its market and customer image, which may have taken years to build.

Considering this, growth is about planning, and nothing is more essential than understanding one's own data to structure a strategic plan for growth. By understanding the data related to the company's structure (financial, administrative, commercial, logistical, and operational), the entrepreneur and the management team can predict possible scenarios, chart routes, and outline points for restructuring with a focus on continuous improvement.

Integrated Management Systems, Critical Analysis and Data-Driven Risk Assessment

Currently, virtually all standards associated with ISO Management Systems, such as ISO 9000 and 14000, prioritize the integration of corporate data into the analytical management schemes of companies. In other articles, we will delve deeper into the standards of Management Systems (MS); here, we only need to understand that the foundation of all MS lies in the data and information acquired and produced by companies, both for the maintenance of the system and for the publication of corporate performance.

Considering this, let's look at a company's customer database, which contains all the information necessary to understand the company's relationship with the customer, from personal information to purchase details, payments, defaults, deliveries, and more. Notably, this data is not shared publicly, but it can be requested by customers and must be made available (as expressed in the Brazilian Access to Information Law).

The LGPD (Brazilian General Data Protection Law) allows entrepreneurs to process data to project their scenarios and determine whether the relationship with a particular client is positive and promotes growth or not. With this in mind, entrepreneurs can use the system data (or even export it to perform analyses in other programs, such as Excel or BI) to generate systemic reports that will demonstrate the company's performance over a given period.

Continuing with the example above, imagine that the data can generate graphs about the number of defaulters, revenue, profit, operating costs, production costs, among others. For example, if it is found that the profit is not covering the operating costs, this is a red flag indicating that the company is in deficit and needs to find ways to correct this serious problem. On the other hand, if it is found that many customers from the previous month did not make purchases this month, the entrepreneur receives a signal that may have several root causes, such as insufficient customer base coverage, product problems, delivery issues, or rejection.

Faced with these analytical situations, entrepreneurs are led to critical analysis and risk management, topics that will also be addressed in depth in other articles. In short, critical analysis involves an interpretative methodology regarding the results obtained in the analysis, seeking to understand which factors led to that analytical result. On the other hand, briefly, risk management seeks to understand how that result affects the company's performance and its operational dynamics. It is also through these two instruments that the company can plan the means to find the root causes of analytical problems and determine corrective actions to ensure the solution of the problem or risk.

With this idea in mind, we can already raise the issue of what is part of strategic planning. By understanding the problems and their root causes through data acquired/produced and processed by companies, businesses can chart a course to determine possible solutions and the measures to be taken to reduce or eliminate the risk or problem. By measures, we should not understand something punctual, that is done and that's it; we should consider "measures" as something continuous, something that becomes part of the operational dynamics and culture of the company, something permanent that is associated with the alert arising from the risk or problem.

Here, simple actions, such as the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) or increasing the number of sales staff, should be highlighted, as well as complex actions, which may require altering the entire business process or an entire organizational system. Therefore, it is understood that critical analysis and risk management are substantially integrated into strategic planning, because it is through these two tools that businesses come to know and structure their own problem-solving dynamics.

Designing scenarios based on information

But strategic planning, based on data, is not only about problem-solving. Strategic planning also uses data to project growth scenarios and to expand production or the supply of services and products, as we discussed earlier. From this perspective, considering data analysis and the integration of different information in the analysis, entrepreneurs can understand how business processes are performed in relation to their capacity to carry out production or supply (services and products).

Consider a company that is producing its products at 100% capacity, meaning it's at its production limit. By processing and analyzing the data, the entrepreneur and their team can identify that it's impossible to produce more than is already being produced. Therefore, to increase production, a strategic growth plan is necessary, which will involve assessing the costs of increasing production, whether through the acquisition of consumer goods (machinery, supplies, expansion of the industrial plant) or the hiring of new employees.

During evidence-based strategic planning (using data and information), businesses can visualize the feasibility of expansion. For example, if a company is producing at 100% capacity but its profits aren't increasing enough to justify acquiring assets and hiring personnel, there's a financial distortion affecting the process, requiring a critical analysis of performance and operational costs. Such problems can stem from incorrect pricing, expenses incurred by individuals at the expense of legal entities, or even internal fraud and corruption.

For this reason, the LGPD (Brazilian General Data Protection Law) mandates the integration of individuals such as data controllers, data processors, and data protection officers (DPOs) to ensure the security and quality of information. The reason may not seem obvious, but these figures provide support for understanding the data and can efficiently and accurately demonstrate specific inconsistencies in the data. In the private sector, figures such as analysts and managers must demonstrate the technical capacity to perform such analytical interpretations and identify problems that hinder the healthy financial growth of companies.

Conversely, returning to the reflection on strategic planning, if the data shows that 100% production is returning to a significant profit, covering all operational costs and allowing reinvestment in process improvement, the data will indicate that there is a possibility of acquiring the assets and hiring. Notably, this is not about thinking "I have the money and I'm going to take action now"; on the contrary, strategic planning will involve the steps for consolidating this acquisition, because it is necessary to have monetary reserves for any risks or problems that may arise during the consolidation process.

In summary...

Therefore, we understand how data acquisition, production, processing, and analysis are fundamental to strategic planning. We emphasize that this data is invaluable in building business models that intend to consolidate in the market, using this information to structure a strategic plan for growth. Data is also of paramount importance for understanding the health of businesses, both in terms of their own relationships (operational schemes) and in safeguarding the business relationships with clients and consumers. In the next article, we will provide further inform