How your growth challenges change

As businesses grow they often experience different growth challenges at different stages. When I have helped businesses like My Baby Sleep Coach to start-up, the challenge is more around getting the fundamentals in place. What is is vision our purpose? Who are our ideal customers. What should our product/service set look like.

As businesses develop and grow, there are typically 3 new growth challenges that emerge. These are:

Let’s explain each scenario in a little more detail.

Growth has stalled. You’ve experienced good early growth on the back of a great product/service and hard work and dedication but now growth seems to have plateaued. Various initiatives have come and gone. Web site refresh, SEO to raise your organic placement, digital marketing to generate further leads, perhaps a new hire or two into “sales” to try and drive up growth. But why hasn’t it worked?

One challenge with businesses is that they are complex systems. Unless you look across the various and interrelated growth drivers in your business and understand how they interact, then making “point fixes” is unlikely to have any kind of sustained effect.

Growing pains. On the back of business growth things are going wrong and it might not be clear why. As businesses reach a certain “critical mass” usually in terms of the the number of staff, but this can also be about the number of clients or customers served, or some other factor in the scale up of the company. It puts pressure on three key factors: people, processes and technology.

If your people don’t have the right skills and aren’t exhibiting the right behaviours then you are likely to put customers off. It could even lead to toxic culture shocks like those experienced in several high profiles organisations recently. If your processes aren’t capable of supporting your growth efficiently and effectively then they start to break down creating rework and damage customer relationships too. And the effect of your enabling technologies can either be a blessing or a curse.

Growth wave. Your challenge is different. Fundamentally, it is about decision making. But in order to avoid the issues above, you need to understand the best growth direction to take and that your whole business is in a place to benefit from a new offering, new target market, or new strategic decision.

This means using systems thinking to look at your business not just in terms of whether your people, processes and technology can support the next growth wave, but also that your existing product ecosystem will not be harmed by this change, and that your sales and marketing processes can deliver the growth wave without damaging your core business.

We can help! We use a systems thinking approach to look at the businesses we help. It looks across these dimensions.

We work backwards from the results you are trying to achieve, and understand all of the different aspects of your business that need to align to deliver those results. The ultimate results of increased profit and / or revenue are driven by two key factors.

1. Finance – how you price and how your customers transact with you (how often and how much).
2. Funnel – how you move your addressable market through your funnel to become leads, customers and advocates.

These are enabled in turn by the “5 Ps”, the enablers of business growth.

Take our quick growth survey now to understand where you sit against each of these elements of your business growth system.