Suppose the goal for your business is to have significant and sustained growth (reflected in increased sales, enhanced market share, or improved profitability). In that case, you won’t achieve that by continuing to do “business as usual.” It’s not a matter of doing more of the same thing. Your business needs to scale up to handle the challenges of this kind of growth that requires dramatic change and transformation.

How do you transform how you do business so your company can scale up and have the impact you want it to have? Here’s a quick overview of the essential elements necessary.

ASSESS: Before you can grow your company, you need to handle your current situation well. You must assess your leadership, people, strategy, execution, and cash situation. Then you’ll have the data and information to make the decisions you need to move forward.

ALIGN: It’s great to have big goals for your company but to succeed, you’ll need to make sure your leadership, people, strategy, execution, and cash management—and even your business model are aligned with your ambitious goals in the long term.

PLAN: Nothing happens without a good plan. But there’s more than one kind of plan. You may have a long-range plan for achieving your goals, but you’ll also need short-term, intermediate intentions to help you get there.

EXECUTE: Even the best plans won’t help you achieve what you want unless you’re executing those plans. One of the keys to excellent execution is measuring the driving activities that lead to success. You need to have the right metrics in place to know that you’re making the kind of progress you want and to have visible dashboards for everyone to see the progress towards the goal.

ACCELERATE: You and your leadership team must continually improve your leadership skills to handle the challenges of dramatic growth. You can’t assume that the skills that got you to where you are will take you where you want to go. There’s no coasting. It will help if you lead your business forward.

TRANSFORM: If you’re committed to these things and disciplined in pursuing them, your business will be transformed. But it’s important to understand that this is not a one-and-done exercise. If you want to keep growing and enjoying continual success, it’s an ongoing process.

We’ve walked thousands of companies through this process. If you’re committed to significant, sustainable growth (and to doing the work necessary to achieve it), we found a person with the tools and experience to guide your business through this process.

Daniel Marcos is an entrepreneur, business coach, and passionate learner. He is the co-founder and CEO of Growth Institute, the leading online executive education company for C-level executives at fast-growing firms. He is also a keynote speaker and a CEO Coach, with a mission to help 1 million entrepreneurs scale their impact and reduce the drama in the process. 

Marcos is a member of YPO and EO and is a certified coach in the Scaling Up methodology. He graduated from EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants, and holds a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from ITESM (Monterrey Tech) and an MBA from Babson College. In his early career, Marcos was recognized in Expansion Magazine’s ’30 under 30′. Also, he’s the EO podcast host at Maestros de Escalamiento.

In less than a decade, Growth Institute has been recognized four times among the top 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the USA for 4 years, with over 55,000 members from 11,000 companies across 70 countries.