5 reasons why your business isn’t growing
Does it feel like your business isn’t growing as much as you’d hoped it would? Are you frustrated because it feels like you’re stuck in a rut of day-to-day delivery, and things aren’t going the way you want them to? It’s time to get off the business hamster wheel and work out what’s stopping your business from growing. In this blog, I’ll tell you 5 of the most common blockers to small business growth and give you ways to unblock them.
By identifying and overcoming these blockers, you’ll be ready to achieve the business growth you already know is possible. Don’t let these growth blockers hold you back anymore. It’s time to break down the barriers and unleash the full potential of your small business.
Blocker 1: Not being the CEO of your business
Even if you’re in a company of one, it’s important to be the CEO of your business. That means making sure you give yourself the time and support to work both IN and ON your business.
After all, your business is like a plant you need to feed and nurture if you want it to grow. It might be super easy to keep watering your plant, but if you ignore its need for light, nutrients, and pruning, you’ll have a shrivelling shrub rather than a thriving garden.
It’s the same in your business. Focusing on working IN your business is often the easy part. It’s where you do what you do best – giving great value to your clients using your skills and expertise. But because you’re so good at the client work side of things, it’s easy to put off the working ON your business part.
Working ON your business means making time to set and achieve goals for business growth. This could include focusing on social media and content, networking, reviewing service offerings or creating a solid business profile to help you improve your performance.
If these tasks aren’t things you’re comfortable with, it’s easy to ignore them. But that’s the worst thing you can do for your business growth. When it comes to being the CEO of your business, 2 powerful things can help – project management software and outsourcing.
Project management software
A simple but often overlooked way to keep on top of all things is to use a project management tool like Asana. We’re not meant to remember everything. And the more that’s in your head, the more overwhelmed you’ll be. Using a project management tool means you can organise your work in a way that works for you. And it makes it easy to have a plan to work both IN and ON your business.
Outsourcing
One of the best things you can do to become CEO of your business is to outsource certain tasks and duties. After all, management is all about delegation and efficiency. Outsourcing takes things off your plate so you can free up your time and headspace and get down to growing your business. And outsourcing doesn’t just have to be about delegating tasks like bookkeeping or social media posting. It can also be about bringing in an Online Business Manager to share the load as your ‘second business brain’ and someone who can help you step into the role of CEO of your business.
Blocker 2: Letting mindset woes win
It might sound a bit woo-woo, but one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in 4 years of running my business is that self-growth comes before business growth. Having a positive growth mindset is the foundation of all successful entrepreneurship. It allows business owners to embrace challenges, overcome adversity and seek continual improvement in their business.
Ways to foster a growth mindset can include:
- believing in yourself and your abilities
- setting goals and working towards achieving them
- embracing challenges and overcoming setbacks
- continuous learning and keeping up with industry trends
- being self-aware about your strengths, weaknesses, values and motivations
- surrounding yourself with supporters who inspire and motivate you
- taking care of your physical and mental wellbeing.
It’s not always easy to embrace a growth mindset, and it’s usually a constant work in progress. But the key is to take steps every day with a dedication to your personal development.
However, if you’re stuck in your ways and don’t want to do the work, your mindset blockers will make it almost impossible to get out of your rut and take your business to the next level. At the end of the day, the success of your business is ultimately up to you. And you don’t want your mindset to hold you back from your business growth.
Blocker 3: Having a narrow focus on your business
Many business owners tell me their management strategy is to stay laser-focused on one business area. They think focusing only on revenue, or client delivery, or systems, gives them the most control over their business. But that simply isn’t true.
By focusing on only one thing, they’re only in control of that one thing.
For a business to grow, you need a holistic approach to its management.
Sure, you might have business systems and automation down pat. But if you’re not networking and marketing, how will people get to know, like and trust you? After all, people buy from people, so you need to be out there as the face of your business, not hidden behind a spreadsheet of systems and automations.
As a business owner, you must be across all aspects of your marketing and operations, which I cover in these key small business foundations for building a strong business.
Blocker 4: Not having a niche
While as a business owner, you need to focus on all the things, when it comes to what your business offers, it can be better to narrow it down to a niche area. In business, we talk about how when you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. And it’s true. If you take a scattergun approach, trying to offer all the services to all the clients, you won’t stand out as an expert in your particular field.
Finding a niche means working out what you want to be known for.
Your niche might be about a particular industry or type of client. Everyone can say they’re the small business coach, small business designer, or small business copywriter. But what kind of small business? There are around 2.5 million small businesses in Australia. You can’t possibly cater to all of them. Try to narrow it down. Do you specialise in an industry or sector? Having an industry niche makes it easier to promote your business to the right clients and become valuable and knowledgeable in a specific industry.
Maybe you don’t want to niche by industry. That’s ok. You could niche by service offering. Rather than offering every type of coaching service, you narrow it down to a service that solves a particular problem. Instead of being a copywriter who writes anything and everything, perhaps you can specialise as an annual report copywriter. Or a website copywriter. Each of those things needs a particular set of skills and knowledge. And often, the skills and knowledge of a specialist are worth more than those of a generalist.
But it can take time to work out your niche. Don’t feel you have to know what it is from day one. It’s a bit like trying on a new outfit. You have to give it a go first to see if it fits and feels right.
And remember, niching doesn’t have to mean you only do the work covered in your niche. It just means that’s what you’re known for. It means that’s your zone of genius. And clients who need your particular zone of genius will be more comfortable knocking on your door than going to someone trying to cater to 2.5 million other businesses.
Blocker 5: Doing everything manually
If you’re at the point where you want to see your business grow, you need to stop doing everything manually and start streamlining your operations.
While it can be easy to do it all initially, keeping on top of everything gets harder and harder, especially if you’re doing it all manually. And the time and effort you’re losing while trying to keep up is time and effort you could be spending on building business growth.
To successfully free yourself from doing everything manually, you need to look at all your processes and systems and think about opportunities for streamlining. This will take time. But, believe me, investing time in nailing this will be so incredibly worth it.
My 3-step program will take you from do-it-yourself drudgery to automated business bliss.
Step 1: Processes
For every process you do manually, you need to identify and document all the things you do and the order you do them.
For example, when you invoice a client, what do you do? You might say you simply create an invoice and email it, but I’m sure that’s not all you do.
How do you know how much to invoice them? When do you know when to send the invoice? What happens after you send it? All these things are part of your process, too.
Take it step by step to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Step 2: Systems
Once you’ve identified your process, you need to consider what systems you use to complete the process.
Take our invoice example. What systems do you use as part of completing that process? Do you use an Excel spreadsheet to track billing and create an invoice in Word? Or do you use accounting software like Xero or Rounded? What other systems come into play here? Do you need to check a time tracking system to know how many hours to bill? What about your emails or proposals to check how much you said you’d charge? Do you use an inventory management system?
Think about every system you touch as part of the process and document what each system does and at what stage of the process.
Step 3: Streamlining
Here’s where the magic happens. Now that we understand the entire process and the systems used to complete it, we look for opportunities to use automation and reduce manual handling.
With our invoicing example, if you’re using Excel and Word, the first thing you need to do is switch to using accounting software. The time saved in tracking payments and following up on late invoices is worth more than the monthly fee – believe me!
But how about other streamlining opportunities? Are you making the most of the systems you have in place?
If you invoice per hour, can you link your time tracking to your invoicing software so the hours are automatically there when you’re ready to invoice? Can you set an automatic overdue reminder to save you time sending a manual follow-up email? Can you set up automation using your project management software to raise invoices based on project milestones automatically?
When you start analysing your manual processes and systems, you’ll find many, many ways to save time and streamline everyday operations.
I know it takes TIME to do this right. And I get it – it feels overwhelming. But it’s such an essential part of unblocking your business growth potential. If you need help implementing this 3-step program, please reach out. My business systems and projects services are all about helping you streamline so you can spend more time building business growth.
Let’s kick these growth blockers to the curb!
Are you ready to become the CEO of your business? And to build a positive growth mindset? Will you do what you must do to take a holistic approach to managing your business? What about niching? Do you know what you want to be known for? And are you ready to streamline your operations so you can spend more valuable time helping your business grow?
Yesssss!
It’s time to kick these blockers to the curb. Do it now! Stand up at your desk and take a power stance. With your hands on your hips and your head held high, promise yourself that now is the time to unblock the blockers and let your whole potential shine.
And if you need a ‘second business brain’ in your corner to help you break through the blockers to your business growth, book a FREE discovery call with me today.
