Owning a business is one of the most rewarding, and the most frustrating, things that you can ever do. The amount of work required to get the business off the ground is tremendous, and it will take more time, energy and money than you anticipated just to get the business started. As the business gets more and more successful, you expect to be able to take a step back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, but sometimes this is not possible because you have allowed the business to become stagnant. When the business goes stagnant, you can get into serious trouble, so you want to make sure that you spend as little time as possible in this phase. Here are some of the things that you can do to handle stagnation.
Anticipate The Hump
First and foremost, you need to be planning for your business to plateau or slow down. There are no businesses in the world that have unlimited, exponential growth, and there is no reason to expect that your business will be any different. Over the lifespan of your business you will come to these plateaus, and you should start to see patterns and warning signs that let you know that the company is not growing. Are reorders per store down? Are your commissioned sales people seeing a decline in commissions? Is your inventory level rising? These are three factors that should let you know that your company is not growing at the rate that it was before, and that means you need to adjust your ordering and expenses so that you can weather the decline in sales. By anticipating the plateau, you can be prepared with advertising or marketing campaigns that will help to get you over the hump, and you can take greater control over your company.
[tp lang=”en” only=”y”]Find Ways To Be Innovative[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]Find Ways To Be Innovative[/tp]
A period of stagnation is a good time for you to experiment with new products and strategies that you want for your company. You do not want to risk losing sales when things are going well by introducing a product or service that does not go over well with customers, so during a period of stagnation feel free to start innovating. Existing customers and customers that have purchased from you before may see their interest piqued if you can come up with something new or a new way to approach sales from what they have seen before.
Take A Step Back
Though this may seem counter-intuitive, one of the best things that you can do when your business starts to stagnate is to take a step back and spend a little less time with the day-to-day aspects of the company, because the closer you are to the problem, the more difficult it is for you to see the big picture. If you start to focus on the minutiae you will lose the perspective that you need to create a strategic vision to lead the company to long term success. Another issue that you will have to deal with is burnout. Spending all of your time and energy on a [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]company that is not growing will only lead to frustration and anger[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]company that is not growing will only lead to frustration and anger[/tp], which will damage your relationship with your customers and your employees. After you have taken a week or so to evaluate where you are and you have come up with some suggestions to break out of the stagnation, then you should jump back into the operations with both feet and implement the new ideas to help your company grow.
A company that is not growing is extremely frustrating, but every business owner will go through a period of stagnation at some point in their career. It is important that you understand where the problems lie, and what you need to do to ensure that you approach the problems from the right perspective. When you do so, you will break out of your stagnation quicker and grow faster than ever before.
Guest article written by: I am Bill Bradley, and I wrote this article to talk about some of the things that I learned at the [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]eFreedom[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]eFreedom[/tp] seminar. They gave me a lot of good tips about how to grow my business and how to deal with situations when my business was not growing as fast as I wanted it to.