Challenges That May Be Affecting Your Business Growth

Regardless of the industry, almost all businesses want to grow. It’s how they measure success and spearheads all of their goals.

Unfortunately, it’s not always so easy.

There are numerous challenges that can get in the way of an organisation growing, and it’s important to identify them in order to overcome them. In this blog I’m going to look at three roadblocks that could be putting the brakes on your growth.

You’re not investing in your employees

You might be thinking, ‘how is increasing the amount of money I spend on my employees going to help our profits grow?’ The real question is, how can you ever expect to grow without investing in your team?

After all, it’s your team that drives your business forward. Fail to hire enough staff, or neglect to invest in adequate training, they will never be able to deliver the level of service or quality of work that successful businesses need.

Let’s take SpotDev as an example.

For us, growth is increasing our client base, but in order for us to provide a great inbound marketing service to those clients we need the right number of people. If in six months time we’ve taken on five new accounts, but haven’t hired any new team members, our quality of service to all of our clients is going to suffer.

Cutting corners on employee training, or hiring less experienced and cheaper staff, is going to significantly inhibit the growth of your company.

You don’t know who your ideal customer is

It’s amazing how many organisations, regardless of how long they’ve been operating for, haven’t spent the time to define what their ideal customer looks like.

How can your business grow sustainably if you’re going after the wrong buyer persona? You’ll be spending money on sales and marketing attracting prospects who are less likely to convert and, even if they do, they’re unlikely to provide a strong basis for long-term growth.

Before undertaking any big push to grow, you need to do some work to clearly define who your specific target market is. Creating buyer personas is integral to developing an inbound marketing strategy, but it’s also worth creating some negative buyer personas, too.

Negative personas are the sorts of prospects you’re not trying to attract, and these are very useful to have when planning your marketing.

Check out our free guide to creating buyer personas for advice on how to go about starting this process.

Your mindset

Sometimes everything is in place for a business to grow - a great service and/or product, an excellent team, the potential customer/client base - and yet the company is stuck where it is because of a self-limiting mindset.

It’s easy to get comfortable with where you are, while it can be hard to envisage beyond your current level. Your business might be making enough money to pay good salaries and take care of the overheads but, if you’re not growing, ultimately you’re only going to head in one direction - backwards.

Employees will have ambitions of their own, and if that ambition isn’t matched by your own then they will move on to pastures new. If you’ve got a great team, will you be able to replace them?

What if the economy changes and suddenly things become much less comfortable? Business growth can, to a degree, protect your company from these sorts of challenges.

So, are you ready to grow? Have you considered integrating your systems to increase efficiency? As a digital growth agency we make it our business to develop your business. Get in touch to find out more about how we can help.