Growing a business is a bit like starting a new exercise routine: The first day is easy and the first week is a little harder, but you’re seeing results. It hurts sometimes, but it’s the pain of knowing you’re doing something good. Excitement and motivation carries you through it. Overall, you’re getting decent results for not too great of an effort.

But as the weeks drag on into months, the gains slow down. The things that worked so well at the beginning are yielding smaller and smaller results. With a loss of results comes a loss of motivation. At this point, it’s easy to give up altogether. This isn’t as easy as it seemed at first. What you do next will determine your success or failure.

Analyze the Problem

The next step after hitting a barrier is to analyze the nature of the barrier. “Analyze” just means “break down,” so we’ll break down the business into its component parts to get a sense of what’s working and what’s not.

When we looked at different growth strategies in this article, growth goals looked like “Building your customer base,” “Developing new products,” or “Retaining existing customers.” That is, they were focused either on operations or on customers. You can use the same sort of thinking to examine growth barriers: are they internal (having to do with the way you run your business) or external (having to do with the market)?

Internal Barriers

A business of any size has many points of failure. Here are some of the common internal barriers you might run into.

Have you differentiated your business? Customers need a reason to choose your company over another. If you haven’t convinced customers of what makes you different or better, begin there. If you feel like you have a strong brand identity but still aren’t reaching the right customers, you might have a marketing issue.

Have you identified your ideal customer? If a lack of strong branding or differentiation isn't the problem, it might be that you don’t know what kinds of customers you are trying to reach.

Are you communicating with your team members? There might be something going on in the day-to-day operations of your business that is slowing things down, setting unclear or unrealistic expectations, or otherwise making it hard for your employees to do their jobs. Employees and teams might not be communicating well, or they might be working in ways contrary to the company philosophy. It’s important to put procedures and policies in place that encourage employees to raise these issues. It’s also common for employees in small businesses to wear many hats and efficiently switch between multiple tasks, but it is possible you could be asking too much of them. If everyone is already working at 100%, there is no room for growth.

Are you examining your own practices? The hardest thing to do is to honestly assess your own performance and abilities. It’s even difficult to understand why you do the things you do. It’s why therapists and coaches exist. It’s why lawyers hire other lawyers to represent them in court. It’s why every writer needs editors and proofreaders. You may have started a business as someone with immense passion, experience, and technical expertise, but managing a business requires an entirely different skillset. This is where a consultant can help you get on the right track.

Other Questions to Consider

Every aspect of business is a point of failure, and there are too many to cover in a single article. Follow the links for more information on each topic.

Are your processes effective?

Is your tech stack efficient, up-to-date, and appropriate for your business?

Are your sales strategies effective?

External Barriers

You might be doing everything right, but you’re not gaining any traction. This is where competitive intelligence can be useful. If your competitors are trying different strategies and are all struggling, there could be a market issue. Maybe your niche is saturated, or there’s little demand for your service, or wider economic issues like supply chain stress, inflation, or high interest rates are holding back growth. Even when facing external barriers, however, strategic planning can give you an understanding of the market and your place within it, and you can develop ways to create demand, capture market share, or simply ride out a difficult economic moment until the conditions for growth arise again.

Make Your Own Luck

When it comes to growing a business, it’s not just luck. It’s a sports cliché to say “you make your own luck,” but it’s also true. Imagine an athlete who seems to have no redeeming qualities—not strong or fast, doesn’t have dazzling technique or fancy moves—but always seems to score an easy goal. He’s lucky, right? You can say he was just at the right place at the right time, but you can’t chalk it up to luck if he’s always at the right place at the right time. That’s the intelligence to read the game and understand, based on experience and good coaching, how any given moment of a match is going to unfold. That’s the ability to analyze a problem and to find a holistic solution.

Between analyzing your marketing practices, your operations, your organizational structure, your tech stack, and your sales strategy, it can be too much for one person to deal with alone. Book a free consult and find out what our team of strategy, marketing, and tech experts can do for you.