4 Reasons a Business will Experience Slow Growth

by Kevin Smith Author

For many business owners, understanding why they are not growing is a complete mystery. In those circumstances, advice from business growth consulting companies can be invaluable, but only if the problems addressed are actually why the business is stagnant; if they do not, nothing will change. Here are four common reasons why businesses often fail to grow and what can be done about them.

Insufficient Marketing

Unfortunately, marketing, especially for businesses that take off quickly, is often overlooked. Marketing in this sense includes your products or services as well as marketing your company to the greater community. Even if your client base is located somewhere different than your headquarters, maintaining an active marketing effort at home and abroad is a smart strategy. This includes general marketing, community outreach, branding, promotions, trade shows, etc.

Fear of Lack of Control

Your business is your baby, but that does not mean you know how to grow it beyond its initial success. Another common factor that leads to stagnation in a business is an owner or owners who refuse to delegate responsibilities, are always looking over their employees’ shoulders and insist on being involved in every little aspect of the business. Most owners do not know their industry as well as they think and usually have no clue as to how to grow it into a staid business rather than a start-up.

Inefficiencies and Impracticalities

When your business was being run out of your house or in a tiny storefront, stuff that you allowed yourself and employees to do was permissible because they did not matter. As your business grows, however, many of those “traditions” are actually destructive to your core goals. For example, when you were a two-person operation, overlooking inventory was OK because you were so small addressing a shortfall was simple. Or maybe your accounting processes lagged because, well, who has time for accounting when you are selling a product? These types of issues that were not problems when you were small can very quickly become major issues when you are a larger company.

Lack of Planning

Initially, when the business was taking off, your “business plan” was to get up early and start selling. As you have grown, that approach has become antiquated and even destructive. Every successful business reaches a point where a more formal approach to planning is necessary in order to allow the company to grow sensibly.

Most businesses that look for help from business growth consulting companies do so because of one of these four issues or a combination of the four. If your business growth is slowing or stagnant start here to begin to get back to consistent growth.