Why Your Business Is Not Growing

Ever wondered why your business is not growing despite working harder or had the feeling that you feel stuck?

This is common in owner-managed businesses after the early years. At the start, it is a struggle to get the business going, but eventually things settle down and doing more of what worked before stops producing results.

More Hours, Same Results

There’s something that comes up again and again in conversations with business owners, who run established businesses.

They are working harder than they ever have. Longer hours, more involvement, more energy going in. Despite this, the business is not growing, and often hasn’t in years. Not because the market dried up, and not because they stopped caring, but, somehow, more effort isn’t producing more results.

Nobody talks about this, because it’s hard to admit. The natural response to a business that isn’t growing is to work harder, so that’s what most people do.

When you start a business, you learn to work hard. You are the one make the calls, closing the deals, delivering the work, and you manage to keep everything running.

This works and the business grows because you poured yourself into it.

But eventually you hit a ceiling, and sometimes owners don’t even realise they’ve hit it. You notice that the hours you’re work keep going up, but growth has levelled off. The to-do list is always full, but nothing changes. You’re busier than ever, but the business is not growing and somehow, it feels like you’re falling behind.

Beyond a certain point, more hours don’t produce more results, just exhaustion.

Effort is not the problem

A business built around your ability has a limit. There’s no way around it, because you can squeeze more hours out of a week, there is a limit to how hard you can work, or how efficient you can be. Eventually you run into the ceiling of what you can do.

Once you’re there, the only way to grow is to change the way you run the business.

Most owners resist this, but not because they’re stubborn, but because working hard feels familiar. Hard work feels productive and changing how the business works does not show immediate results. It’s slower, it’s less visible, and it’s also scary. It’s outside of your comfort zone, so it gets ignored. It needs a way of thinking that’s hard to do when you’re already stretched. In this situation, most people do what has always worked for them before. They decide to push harder, but the ceiling holds.

If working harder was going to fix it, why hasn’t it worked yet?

You haven’t been taking it easy. You’ve been working hard and long hours. If the answer to the problem was to put in more effort, why aren’t you already be it? The fact that your business is not growing tells you something, the solution is different from what you’ve been trying.

What the ceiling looks like

Some owners assume they’re going through a difficult patch, instead of hitting a limit.
When you hit a ceiling, it can show up in different ways. It may show when some new work comes in, but there’s not enough capacity to take it on. You end up being involved in things that you shouldn’t need to be involved, but there’s nobody else to handle them. You pass on good opportunities because the business can’t resource them. The little things start to get forgotten, as the focus shifts to the important things. Your staff gets frustrated because decisions are slow and nothing moves without you approval or sign-off.

Revenue might be consistent, or it might go up slightly in good months and drop back when you get pulled in a different direction. The business depends entirely on where your attention is that week.

This is connected to the bottleneck problem, described in The Bottleneck Test.

The ceiling and the bottleneck are the same thing, but seen from different sides. One is about growth, but the other is about dependency. They have the same root cause and they have the same fix.

Why Owners Keep Pushing Instead of Changing

Understanding why the ceiling exists is one thing. Doing something about it is another.

The reason most owners don’t change the structure is that changing it requires time and mental space that they don’t have. “You’re working on the business, rather than in it” is advice that you hear a lot. This is true, but it assumes you can create that space, whilst you continue to run everything else. For most owners, working out how to do this is the hardest part.

There’s also the issues of confidence. Letting go means you need to trust other people to handle things, and you need to accept that some things will not be done how you’d do them. This requires confidence in the business, and this takes time to come to terms with. Owners who built a business, find it difficult to hand decisions to people who don’t have a track record.

So, they keep doing what they’ve always done, working as they’ve always worked, but the ceiling still holds and the business is not growing.

What you need to Change

A lot of effort went into the business to get it to where it is now. It took commitment to do whatever needed doing, for however long it took. You paid salaries, you served clients and you created something from nothing.

But the next stage needs thought and planning, as well as effort. You need systems that work without you having to operate them. You need to build a team that makes decisions rather than escalating everything to you. You need a structure that grows beyond your capacity.

This is not a criticism of you, or how you built the business. Most businesses are built this way, and that way made sense in the early days. The problem is that working that way stays in place, and this can be until long after the business has grown to the point where it should be changed.
How To Document Business Processes covers the specific areas to focus on when you start building that kind of structure.

Decision rights, client ownership, financial reporting, delivery processes. Each one reduces the dependency on the owner and creates the conditions for the business to grow without the owner being the constraint.

Get your Team To Take Ownership looks at the team, because systems can’t fix a team issue. The culture around decisions and decision making needs to change too.

You’re asking the wrong question

Owners who hit their ceiling ask: how do I work harder to get past this?

The real question is: how can I build something that works without me having to work this hard?

The ceiling won’t move because you’re pushing against it. It moves when you stop holding it up.

This is not just about your day-to-day workload. If you have a business that does not have a dependency on the owner, it’s worth more, is easier to scale, and is easier to sell when the time comes. Buyers will look at how a business would perform without you in the room. If the answer is “not well,” that is reflected in the offer. Article 4: What a Buyer Actually Sees [exit-blueprint.com/what-a-buyer-actually-sees] shows you what this looks like from the other side of the table.

Have you hit a ceiling in your business? What’s seems to stop your growth, no matter how much effort you put in?