Building and growing a business requires passion and dedication. Most days business owners face a number of challenges. One of the main challenges they face is successfully growing their business.
Here are 6 common growth challenges and actions you can take to overcome them.
Photo by Anna Nekrashevich from Pexels
1. Finding Customers
This first one isn't just a small business problem.
The marketers at well-known companies such as Apple, McDonalds etc don't just sit around waiting for the leads to come in. Even the biggest, most successful companies have people working hard every single day to find new customers.
But, for small businesses, the challenge is even more significant.
How can you find customers when you're not a household name?
And, there are so many channels to focus on for acquisition, but how do you know what to prioritize?
In addition, acquisition costs are incredibly high, and small businesses may not have the same spending power as larger, more established businesses.
In fact, the cost of acquiring new customers has increased almost 60% over the past six years. If this is something you're struggling with, you're not alone:
49% of companies report that customer acquisition is their primary marketing objective.
Finding customers starts with figuring out who your ideal customer is.
Spraying and praying doesn't work for anybody, you need to make sure you're spreading the word to the right people.
Craft an idea of what your target customers look like, what they do, and where they spend time online by building your buyer personas .
Creating very specific templates can dramatically improve your business results.
If you don’t know the profile of your ideal client or customer how can you help them solve their most pressing problems?
Once you've built your personas, you can begin creating content that caters specifically to your target demographic and share it in the channels you know they're in, with the messages you know they care about.
2. Increasing Brand Awareness
If your customers don't know who you are, how will they buy from you?
Customers follow the path Know - Like - Trust
If customers don’t know you then how can they buy from you?
Statistics show that, in terms of success, brand managers say that building an audience is more valuable than direct sales, and, because of this, marketers in 2021 say that their primary goal for running marketing campaigns is building brand awareness.
This focus is largely because building brand awareness helps generate trust with your audience, helps them associate your brand with your products and services, and those factors combined help drive sales and build a base of loyal customers.
As a small brand, it can sometimes seem like today's biggest names seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. How did they become a household name? How did they grow that quickly? Can your business grow like that, too?
Of course, most of these companies' hard work, failures, and rejections happened behind the scenes. But, there are strategies for spreading the word about your brand and building an excellent reputation that you can start using right away.
There are many ways to spread brand awareness, but the two I'll mention here are co-marketing and content marketing.
Co-marketing: Partnering with another brand will help you inherit some of their image and reputation and create brand evangelists outside your circle. It's a fantastic way to gain a large volume of new contacts alongside your organic marketing efforts.
Content Marketing: Running a consistent, high-quality content marketing plan will help you build brand awareness. Not only does a blog help drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads, but it also enables you to establish authority in your industry and trust among your prospects. It'll also help you build an email list.
3. Lead Generation
Another problem most small businesses share is lead generation specifically, generating enough leads to keep the sales team happy.
Marketers also report that this is a top priority , but, at the same time, also indicate that lead generation is a key challenge that business leaders face.
Given this, generating leads that are both high quantity and high quality is an important objective. A successful lead generation engine turns website visitors into prospective customers and provides a steady stream of sales prospects while you sleep.
To make the lead generation process work for your business, you need to first optimize your existing website for conversions . Your website is the most essential tool you have for turning prospects into customers.
Look through your website and ask yourself:
Do each of your webpages clearly guide visitors to take action, or do they leave them wondering what to do next?
Are you creating custom landing pages for every single campaign that you run?
Do you have lead generation CTAs on each of your blog posts? (Do you have a blog at all?)
Prioritize the most popular pages on your website first. Most businesses have a few specific pages that bring in most of their traffic, often the homepage, "About" page, "Contact Us" page, and maybe one or two of your most popular blog posts.
Then, implement conversion tools such as:
Hello bars
Slide-ins
Capturing leads is only the start. Once you have a lead you need to nurture that lead and build a relationship with your prospects and customers.
4. Failing to Plan for Cash Flow
More resources increase ability, efficiency, and quality.
Unfortunately, access to many of these resources comes through having capital, but small businesses reported that a lack of capital or cash flow was their number one challenge
Financial planning with limited resources and a budget can be complex for small businesses.
Every business will be different, but you'll want to use business credit wisely, cut costs where possible, and manage cash flow by staying on top of invoices and bookkeeping.
Business accountants and financial advisors can help you analyze your financial situation and help you make good decisions.
With growth comes extra cost. If your outgoings are more than your income, even for a short period, paying your bills gets difficult. In fact, cash flow issues are one of the most common reasons why small businesses fail 90 percent close their doors for this reason.
To preserve cash flow while growing your business, you may need access to funding.
But take time to consider which loan types make sense for you because not all are created equal.
For example, if you're looking to fund expansion or need an injection of cash during unpredictable operating cycles you may want to explore a business line of credit .
You can set up a line of credit before you need it and only pay for the funds you use. Lines of credit are revolving, and monthly payments don't kick in until you dip into the cash.
Another option is a term loan.
This gives you access to a set amount of money with a specific repayment schedule.
Term loans often have low interest rates and provide the funding for small business growth initiatives such as opening a new location, upgrading equipment, purchasing vehicles, or remodeling your space.
With a term loan funding your growth you can preserve your cash flow for other areas of your business such as payroll.
To make planning work for your business, you should revisit it as you grow. In that way, it's less about the plan and more about planning.
5. Having the Right Systems in Place
When your team gets bigger you need to have systems in place.
A business is simply people doing activities; you lead people and manage their activities, you don’t manage people. Having systems will allow you to focus on leading your people.
At the same time, you can't be everywhere at once as a business leader.
So how do you focus on the business while ensuring that everyone working in the business has what they need? This is why a common challenge for small businesses is effectively managing workflow, especially as your business scales.
If you've ever worked at a company where there were more than 5 or 6 employees, then you know how hard it can be to keep track of everything going on.
You might even find yourself asking: "How do I make sure everyone knows what they should be doing?"
The answer? A system!
Systems help you manage your workflow by making sure all tasks get completed correctly and efficiently. They also ensure that no one person has too many responsibilities.
All businesses produce and rely on large amounts of information. From financial documents, customer interactions, employee information and so on.
This data can become very difficult to manage – let alone use effectively – without the right systems. These tasks may be delegated as your business grows, but without solid information management systems, the less you can manage effectively and efficiently.
Putting the right systems in place is an essential part of helping your business to grow.
Documentation, policies and procedures also become increasingly important. The informality that might have worked with few employees and a handful of customers is a hinderance in a growing business.
Your business needs proper contracts, clear terms and conditions, effective employment procedures and so on. The best time to invest in these is when your business is growing, as to build a solid foundation to manage and streamline processes that exhibit best practices.
6. Hiring Talent
To grow your business, delegating properly is essential.
When your business is growing, workloads can rapidly intensify. It is important staff are not too overloaded, and that more people are employed to cover the additional work coming in.
Keeping in mind it is just as important that your business hires the right people.
This is so that as a business owner, you can put your trust in your management team and give up day-to-day control of every detail – so as not to stump creativity and motivation with excessive interference.
As the business becomes more complex, business owners also need to develop time management skills and learn to focus on what is really important.
Sometimes the aid of outside help is advantageous, especially when you recognise your own limitations and aid further growth as a result.
Today, 40 percent of organizations report that they have been negatively impacted by talent scarcity
To grow you need to surround yourself with great people. Always be on the lookout for talent.
Build a stable of independent contractors who can get to know your business well and contribute on an as-needed basis. Once you're ready to grow they can step in with minimal ramp-up and help you meet your goals.
Hiring the wrong person can cost you more than just money; it can also damage your brand and reputation.
It is therefore essential that you make sure you are hiring the best candidate for the job before making any offer of employment.
You should always look at what skills they possess, how much experience they have, whether or not they fit into your team’s culture, and if they would bring something unique to your organisation.
With a little thought and planning these challenges can be overcome. Being persistent and disciplined in following through on your actions will allow you to build the business you desire.
