Why Isn’t My Business Growing? Symptoms of a Stuck Company
Is your company stuck?
Call it what you will: a wall, a plateau, a ceiling.
Getting stuck is frustrating, and it’s exhausting. You intuitively know something is wrong. You’re putting in way too much effort and not getting enough return. In short, you’re blocked from real GROWTH.
As consultants, we see clients present with a lot of different symptoms when their companies are stuck.
Symptoms of a Stuck Company
• Employee turnover. Your team is a revolving door of employees who are constantly coming and going. You can’t retain top talent, and you’re wasting time training and retraining new people who only stick around a few months.
• Missing profitability targets. Quarter after quarter, you fall short of your goals. This could be tied to a broken business model of inflated overhead expenses. The result is that you, the business owner, are working too hard—without a bottom line to show for it.
• Not enough leads. Lead flow is one of the biggest blockers to growth. Without enough leads, you don’t have enough clients. Without enough clients, you can’t scale your business. The equation is simple. Lead flow is the kind of problem that keeps an entrepreneur up at night.
• Company vision unclear. If you don’t know where you’re headed, it’s awfully difficult to set a course to get there. A related issue is that the business owner is clear on the company vision, but there’s no mechanism for sharing that vision with the entire team to get them on board.
• Always reinventing the wheel. Ever have that haunting feeling when you’re discussing an issue, like you’ve been here before? If your team spends too much time hunting down old processes (that aren’t being used) or creating solutions that never get implemented, you’re reinventing the wheel.
• You feel overworked or just aren’t having fun. This symptom could show up on its own or in combination with the others. It’s the most devastating part of having a stuck company: when the thing you’ve worked so hard to build feels like it’s taking over your life.
How to Get Your Business Unstuck
If you have a stuck company, you aren’t alone. Hitting these walls is a natural part of growing a business. It’s staying stuck that’s the problem.
As entrepreneurs, we like to quickly identify fixes. When we get stuck, we actively seek out solutions to get things moving again.
The problem is that those solutions are often too surface-level. They speak to the symptom without diagnosing the underlying disease.
And many solutions, while they do have value, are one-offs. There isn’t enough infrastructure to tie all the different tools and tactics together. So they have a tendency to become “flavor of the week” fixes instead of long-term solves.
Then what does work?
What works to get your company unstuck is stopping the “put out fires as they happen” approach. If you’re playing whack-a-mole with the problems in your business, you’re going to burn out.
Instead, you need an integrated system that addresses every part of how you run and grow your organization. Because underneath all of the symptoms of being stuck, not having that underlying methodology is the real problem.
If you’re struggling with one or more of these symptoms, we can help. We’ve resolved hundreds of these exact same issues for our clients. Ask us how.
