How to do a sector growth plan

Research

1. Gather together all the documents that relate to growth, and industry statistics over the past five years.

2. Ensure that the statistics you gather give you

   1. Sub-sector turnover (that total up to the overall sector turnover).

   2. Number of people employed in each sub-sector (that total the overall employment in the sector).

3. Visit a sample of the main employers in each sub-sector and get from them:

   1. Average growth in turnover over the past three years.

   2. Average number of employees each year for the past three years.

   3. Expectations of growth in turnover and staff in each year for the next three years.

Headings and summaries of contents

Background

Extract from the source documents and quote from them assurances that government, labour, private sector and NGO’s all see the sub-sectors as areas for potential expansion, especially in the capacity to create jobs.

Make up a table that quotes turnover and labour statistics from all the sources (including your sampling of the main employers).  Look for disagreement.  If there is still disagreement in data (this means differences of over 7%), then simply average them and call them an estimate.

Position the sector for which you are doing the growth strategy in terms of:

• Its aims and objectives.

• Statutory or constitutional obligations.

• Constituencies it serves.

• Stakeholders.

• SWOT Analysis.

• The country, the region, the continent and the world.

Infrastructure

Here you will list the companies that are working and operational in the sector, their products and their target markets.  Try and value them, so that you can put an annual turnover to each market, and in terms of their feedback, what percentage increase in annual growth they hope for.

Potential

Now you do an interesting exercise:

You look at the historic growth of each sector nationally, and based on an average of the last three years, project the potential growth for each sector into the future.

Do an analysis of the sector and break it up into sub-sectors that you an measure.

Now you make a table of the national sub-sector figures and compare them with the local estimates for growth.

If you average between them, you have a reasonable forecast for growth in all sub-sectors on an annual basis.

If you compound this figure for ten years, you have an estimate of where each sub-sector could be in ten years time.

Finally, look at the national figures, and get an idea of how many people work for each R1-million of turnover.  You will find it is fairly constant.

You can now extrapolate from the forecast of the provincial turnover in ten years time, how many people that turnover will employ.  This is a crucial figure as this is what drives decision-making, not the turnover figure.  The figure that drives all acceptance of the strategy will be the number of jobs the sector will create.

Gap Analysis

In the last exercise, you averaged between the national average and what the active people expected. This is fair, as you cannot expect a new sector to achieve the average of sectors that are long established at the same rate given the lag behind the more established sectors.

So you subtract the expectations from the projected figures.  This gives you the financial gap.

Now you do two separate exercises.

• To develop the local industry you need training.

• To develop the national, regional and global markets you need marketing.

Training

You take your financial gap in local production, and roughly ten percent of that is what the province has to invest in training.

The total financial gap divided by the average number of people gives you the number of people you have to train.  That figure gives you one producer for every ten technicians and artists that have to be trained.

Marketing

You take the financial gap in facilitation and roughly seven percent of that is what the province has to spend on marketing.

Summary

You can now summarise:

1. Sub sectors
2. Growth potential of each.
3. Investment needed to achieve this growth in training and marketing.
4. Recommended activities to which these investments should be applied.