home Calculators Why is business not growing? Why it’s not growing: key mistakes entrepreneurs make when scaling a business What to do if the business isn’t growing

Why is business not growing? Why it’s not growing: key mistakes entrepreneurs make when scaling a business What to do if the business isn’t growing

Today your company could earn five times more or enter new markets. But from year to year financial director shows all the same numbers. And sooner or later this stability will not be enough to withstand the constantly changing market.

If you understand today what is slowing down the development of your business, tomorrow you will forget about these problems and figure out how to take the company to a new level of success.

Here are six likely reasons why your business is stagnating.

1. Your company does not have a unique selling proposition - potential clients perceive you as “just another one in the crowd”
If you are not aware of this approach, your business is not yet ready to grow. A unique selling proposition is what sets your company apart from its competitors. If you don't have enough imagination to come up with absolutely New Product or service - pay attention to other aspects. The most convenient way is to develop unique selling methods. For example, for many years, Domino's Pizza has guaranteed that your food will be delivered in 30 minutes or less.

Ideally, your unique trade proposal should be combined with the company slogan - so customers will easily remember the name of the company.

2. Your employees do not communicate with each other enough - because of this, few new ideas are generated
Several years ago, standard business practice was to divide the business into departments that had virtually no communication with each other. On the one hand, really, why does the sales department need to communicate with the design department? But poor communication between company employees hinders business development. Therefore, pay attention to team building and work to ensure that all employees are as involved as possible in general work companies. You may even have to invite a specialist in effective team management to do this.

3. You forgot about feedback with existing clients - and therefore you lose potential
Before making a purchase, most modern consumers conducts mini-research. The main thing they are looking for is proof of your company's reliability. And to do this, they look at case studies, reviews, mentions in the media, and customer statistics. Therefore, make sure that potential clients know about your regular ones, and promptly answer customer questions.

4. You don't double-check yourself and lose money due to the same mistakes
Without reliable analytical tools, you won't know for sure how much your company's profits or employee productivity have increased. Therefore, in order to make any decisions that should lead to business development, it is important to have a so-called “on-site testing strategy”.

There are many online and offline analytical tools that will make it possible to holistically assess business performance. For example, Google Analytics provides statistical data about visitors to your site. Based on this information, track the effectiveness of your online robot.

5. You doubt suppliers and don’t know what to expect from them.
If there were no business suppliers, your products would never reach customers. But if you don't know what you can expect when working with a supplier, don't expect significant business growth.

Good relationships with suppliers, knowledge of the list of all their services and maximum profitable terms cooperation will constantly develop your business.

6. You don’t have a clear goal, so your business floats with the waves of the market.
It's important to understand exactly how much growth you want to achieve before you decide to grow your business. For example, think about opening branches in other cities or expanding the product line to enter new markets. It is important to set a goal, create a strategy and plan every action to achieve it. It is through regular small steps that you can achieve huge results.

In order to remain competitive in an ever-changing market, it is important to be able to adapt and regularly work on business development. By understanding what exactly is slowing down the growth of your business, you can finally achieve significant results.

Based on materials from BusinessBlogs

Not everyone knows that the day before the Titanic sank, she received seven warnings about icebergs on the way, but never changed course. The radio operators did not transmit the signal to the captain because they were busy with other work and did not believe that the ship was even capable of sinking.

To prevent your business from sinking in the same way, stop putting off important tasks until later. Perhaps these tasks do not urgently need to be completed here and now, but if they are never done at all, the company simply will not be able to move on. Your job as a leader is to prevent such problems. Remember: the problem will not solve itself.

If you want to truly get rich, you'll have to learn how to earn money while you sleep.

#2 You do everything yourself

If everything in your business is tied to you, then you do not have a business - this is ordinary self-employment. If you want to truly get rich, you'll have to learn how to earn money while you sleep. A company cannot grow relying on the resources of only one person, no matter how advanced and competent he may be.

The Tula branch of “Etazhi” could not grow for a long time - the business hit the ceiling, revenue remained at the same level, and the staff did not increase. The director did everything herself. Based on the recommendations of the central office, the director began to form a strong management team: the potential of each employee was assessed based on the company’s priorities. As a result, the staff doubled over the year, and so did the revenue.

There is a similar story about the Moscow branch. It could not be launched for a long time - until a competent manager appeared Zatonsky Evgeniy. His strategy was to recruit quality personnel at the start.

If your business is falling apart without your participation, it's time to build a team you can trust. This leads to the third mistake.

#3 You hire weak people

There is one trait that is always absent in weak employees and present in strong ones - responsibility. A strong person is aware that every action he takes has consequences. He doesn’t just follow orders, but he himself suggests what can be improved and where things can be done better. How to recognize such a person?

Take a closer look at their resume: most likely, they achieved good results in past projects or Everyday life. Even if a person came straight after university, then in 22 years he should have a baggage of achievements: sports rank, All-Russian Olympiad, your project, blog, website or school medal with honors.

If there is already a weak link in your team, do not rush to fire the employee right away. Analyze his role in the company: does this position really need the initiative we are talking about? For example, an accountant does not need to generate new ideas to work well, but a manager does.

If the position requires the generation of new ideas, but the last time a person came to you was six months ago to raise his salary, you need to talk to him. Find out what's going on: perhaps the problem is not with the employee, but with difficult life circumstances. Or maybe the position is simply unsuitable.

#4 You think you know everything

If there is no change, there is no development. Look at other companies and find what they do better. Understand how others' processes work and implement the most effective solutions in your business. And yes, do not limit yourself to a village, city or country - the world has long become global. Use the best international practices now.

People want to work autonomously. If you control them every day, there will be no result

#5 Rely on micromanagement

People are different: some people need to be monitored once a month, while others need to be monitored every day. To ensure that control does not seem excessive and does not affect the employee’s motivation, it is necessary to maintain a distance.

People want to work autonomously. If you control them every day, there will be no result. Try giving your employees periodic checks rather than daily checks—for example, once a week. This not only does not interfere with work, but also additionally disciplines the person. The feeling of independence will not disappear anywhere: in the intervals between checks, the person himself decides what to do and in what sequence.

#6 You rely on intuition

If you think that you have a lot of experience, you can allow yourself to rely on intuition. After years of work, an entrepreneur begins to pick up on things that may not be noticed at first glance, but which can tell a lot - they help make smart, intuitive decisions.

Unfortunately, beginners cannot see these things. Therefore, if you have no experience, then you need to rely only on facts and figures.

We answer questions

Can a top manager make mistakes?

A top manager needs to make mistakes. If he is not mistaken, most likely he is not taking action to change the current situation.

How to distinguish an error from negligence?

If an employee tried to do a good job, put all his strength and resources into the solution, but it didn’t work out, most likely he won’t repeat this mistake again. If an employee joined the work late and made a superficial decision because he wanted to finish things quickly, such a team member will probably let you down again.

Have your intuitive decisions let you down?

Of course, they let us down. For example, when I was thinking whether to hire a person or not. Intuition suggested that the person was motivated, capable and would go far - life showed the opposite. As a result, the company lost time and money, and the employee had to be fired.

There was also the opposite situation: when I did not want to leave the person and was sure that he would not be with us for long. My deputy insisted that this specialist would prove himself, and I reluctantly agreed. Now this employee has climbed the career ladder.

Is it possible to build a business with friends?

There is a well-established opinion that you should not start a business with friends and family members. I'm willing to bet that the world knows many examples that have proven the opposite. Twitter, Google, Microsoft - they were all founded by friends who still maintain excellent relationships.

How to avoid mistakes if you are at the beginning of your journey?

The concept of business is familiar to everyone. Everyone, at least once in their life, has thought and dreamed about their own business, which will bring not only monetary profit, but also the pleasure of doing what they love. Creating a business is not an easy task, so not everyone can realize their dreams.

Despite the failures of others, many aspiring businessmen want to try themselves in this field. It is at the initial stage of creating your own business that many difficulties arise, which often become too much for a beginner to overcome, which, in turn, leads to discord in the work and further disintegration of the goal that has not achieved its triumph.

But you should not be afraid of possible “cracks” in the development of your own, since such a phenomenon can accompany a person not only in this area. All difficulties must be overcome with a cool mind and endurance, and the main weapon in the fight against failures must be dedication and determination. Right organized activity, which, both at the initial stage and at the stage of its development, is based on the so-called, reflecting the entire process of doing business, contributes intensive development a conceived idea that will bring the entrepreneur both pleasant material benefits and great interest in his work.

Not only improperly organized activities and the human factor of the entrepreneur himself, but also the conditions in which it is created can negatively affect the development of a business. IN in a broad sense conditions mean the state in which it is decided to implement one’s thoughts. Let's figure out why business in Russia is not developing?

To our regret, business in Russia has significantly low indicators of economic importance in comparison with the countries of the European Union. It should be noted that, despite the increase in the number of organizations and enterprises created with the aim of increasing monetary profits, the number of workers engaged in activities in these companies is becoming smaller. The conclusion suggests itself that people tend to move either to more profitable farms from an economic point of view, or begin to engage in so-called shadow business, which is illegal.

Let's consider a number of reasons hindering development in Russia:

One of the most important factors One of the factors influencing the stagnation of the business industry in Russia is high taxation. Many enterprises and firms operating abroad, take Canada for example, receive enormous amounts of profit from their activities, while similar enterprises in Russia suffer colossal losses. It can be calculated that in different countries all organizations work differently, this is true, but if the same organization from abroad were put in the conditions of the Russian economy, that company would suffer huge losses, performing the same functions as in its homeland, where its activities were estimated at billions profit.
An equally pressing reason is the lack state support. In fact, help in entrepreneurial activity There is still assistance from the state, but many entrepreneurs have no idea how to direct this assistance to their activities. It is precisely this lack of awareness that prevents the full development of a business, since additional capital investment in many cases could solve many business problems. Currently there are about 600 government programs on business support, many of which are carried out at the federal level.
A separate column should highlight the stagnation in the development of small and medium-sized businesses. This is due, first of all, to the presence of great competition in the labor market, in which established companies and newcomers, against whose background they are not quoted, gain the upper hand. At the same time, the existence big business, which provides the same services as small-scale businesses, also “presses” the development of small organizations, which, in turn, can only suspend their existence.

How to get out of a crisis situation

Unfortunately, businessmen cannot resolve this issue on their own. This is due to the fact that the problems arising from the lack of business development are global, and their prevention can only be dealt with at the state level.

The only way out in this situation is to either purchase ready-made business with good profit indicators, or doing business abroad, where the states themselves contribute to the fruitful development of business ideas.

Is it worth doing business in conditions of weak development?

Despite the fact that business development in Russia is not gaining any momentum, the possibility of its existence is still quite likely. The only question is the profit that you can earn in such tight conditions of the business industry.

Of course, it is more rational, from an economic point of view, to organize your business abroad, where, under the same business conditions, the profit will be many times higher, with the same demand for the service offered by the company.

But it also makes sense to try to implement your business in Russia, since if the business really becomes very relevant for society, then along with wide distribution among consumers, it will also be able to acquire a better position from a financial point of view.

Thus, in this article we have examined several reasons that have a negative impact on the development of business ideas, which causes stagnation in the business industry. As it turned out, the reasons for many difficulties with business development are the state’s indifference to entrepreneurial activity, which, first of all, lies in uncontrolled taxation.

Five tips for taking things to the next level

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My name is Mikhail Voronin, I am the founder and ideologist of the Atlanta business community.

Why are there so few unicorn companies in Russia yet? You can talk for a long time about administrative barriers, stagnation, growth of the public sector, etc. But when you start listening to the entrepreneurs themselves, it turns out that internal barriers often prevent you from reaching a different scale than external factors. I was once again convinced of this when Atlanta, as a partner of Roscongress, held a Business Bath as part of the SME Forum on the starting day of SPIEF 2018. Discussed scaling errors.

The business bathhouse is Atlant’s own format, which we came up with several years ago. It combines both training and brainstorm, and networking. This is a personal board of directors of 10 businessmen who share their expertise on a given topic with each other. Entrepreneurs are essentially lonely people. Many of the issues that keep you up at night cannot be discussed with your subordinates, your childhood friends, or your family. But with other similar entrepreneurs - for each round table it’s easy for an expert and representatives of a business of a similar scale, but from different areas and with different competencies, to sit down. The principle of “self-sharpening knives” is one of the key ones for our business community. “Atlantas” help you scale your business, move to a new level, develop and grow personally and professionally. I know from myself that this is not easy. What should you keep in mind to grow painlessly? Here are five key mistakes that entrepreneurs themselves most often make.

1 - The manager’s consciousness does not keep pace with the company’s growth

Companies with 10, 50 and 200 employees are three completely different companies, with different organizational structures and management approaches. It is important that when moving from one stage to another, the manager’s consciousness corresponds to the stage of development of the company.

When it is much ahead, it is also not always good. But in practice, what most often happens is that a company outgrows its creator. For example, it happens that an entrepreneur’s idea hits the mark, the business begins to grow by leaps and bounds, but the boss does not have sufficient skills to manage a company of this scale. It may not slow down the growth of the business, but it certainly does not allow it to realize its full potential.

You can combat this by sifting through business literature, participating in professional discussions, and studying the cases of other companies that have already gone down the same path. It would be a good idea to get a business education.

2 - Delegate and share

Another problem is internal restrictions and prejudices. They are inherent in every person, but in the case of entrepreneurs, as a rule, they harm not only him personal development, but also for business. At the Business Ban as part of the SPIEF, which we organized, entrepreneurs named authoritarianism, manual management, and inability to delegate among the mistakes - growth is hampered by the fact that the owner is physically unable to cope with the growing load. Many are convinced that no one in the company can handle negotiations with key clients or resolve crisis cases better than them. However, when there are no longer 10 of these cases per month, but 100, you basically cannot work with them alone.

It can be difficult to change your role in a company. If for many years the owner-manager was, for example, a professional salesman and manager responsible for key clients, then transforming into a universal manager who controls all areas of the company’s work is not easy. Conventionally, for the last 5-8 years you have been busy with the fact that, despite stress and rush jobs (entrepreneurs generally feel great in such an environment), you have pulled out projects, receiving a lot of emotions. And now you need to retrain as a builder and meticulously create organizational structure, train employees, implement a motivation system. And most importantly, it’s painful to look at how your subordinates cope with turnover - after all, you yourself would definitely do everything much better.

It is important to decide whether you are ready for such changes. If not, you need to follow the partnership path and look for a builder to join the team who will rebuild business processes, leaving for himself the role of those responsible for the “drive”. It is worth remembering the other extreme - after reading business literature, some still relatively young entrepreneurs begin to manage a medium-sized company as if it were a large one, delegating everything that is delegated and forcing it into the framework of prescribed standards and procedures.

3 - No trust in the team leader

At any event where representatives of small and medium-sized businesses gather, people talk more about the team than anything else. If there are no people with the required qualifications, there is no growth. No right one corporate culture- no growth. No motivation - no growth. For example, I don’t know how to work with people from whom I need to demand. It is important for me to hire the right people, captivate them, create fairly comfortable conditions - then the team works wonders. But the team must have a leader whom people trust. Often an entrepreneur puts himself above the business, above the company. Either the ego grows faster than the business, which also does not contribute to the formation of trust in the leader; the team does not support him in achieving success. new round development. Mikhail Fridman, speaking at our last Atlanta forum, partly touched on this issue, revealing the secret of how to avoid getting star fever while being a billionaire.

4 - Rapid loss of motivation

One of the key mistakes when launching new projects is losing interest in the project after launch. The entrepreneur gets fired up and gets carried away, but without getting quick results, he loses motivation. And after him, the team also loses it, the transition to a new round is blown away. People are always looking at you, they determine their future by your mood. I understood this very well when I once allowed myself to become discouraged after a lost tender. You set the mood, create the context. Based on your condition and interest, people understand whether the new project and the company as a whole have prospects. And to go into apathy is at least irresponsible.

And that’s what failures and difficulties are for, to overcome them. Development is always pain, leaving your comfort zone, patience. You can say as much as you like that this is banal. But you can’t do the splits without hundreds of workouts and pain. Either you are really ready for your bones to crunch, your blood to boil, your emotions to go off scale, your brain to explode, or don’t start.

In life, when people encounter pain, most move away from it, explaining that, apparently, this is not their path. Many people start whining. In business, it is important to remember that you are in a long run. But at the same time, don’t get stuck if things really aren’t going well in your new field, even though you gave your 200%.

5 - The speed of implementation of changes is insufficient

A critical factor in these days when everything changes very quickly - as long as you innovate in response to a changing environment, the situation can radically change. You need to be proactive, constantly monitor trends and look for “tricks”. This year we will devote the business forum to designing the future. And for small businesses, I am sure that knowledge of trends is important. This allows you to fully face the future and find your place in it. Entrepreneurs are much more flexible than large corporations. It’s just that they often don’t have enough knowledge and time for strategy - to do this they need to switch off from the routine. Business forums, by the way, are one of the tools for this.

I decided to draw an analogy between business processes and... teachings in the Indian Vedas. It turned out that in the development of a business one can distinguish the same stages as in a person’s life. How to apply such knowledge in practice and protect the project from premature death - read below.

Today it is believed that business growth should be continuous, maximum and eternal. Everyone aspires to it, and, perhaps, this is a good aspiration. True, there are many cases where growth does not bring the benefit, joy and prosperity that is expected.

Let's figure out what kind of growth a business needs, when exactly, and what rules can be applied to grow not only wisely, but also usefully.

Stubborn capitalist exponent

Today's business (and especially the fragile minds of talented, entrepreneurial youth) cannot but be influenced by the system of propaganda of the capitalist way of doing business. The main goal business, as in the 90s, net present value is considered, and in programs about “business from scratch” it is stated that developing a business with a turnover of tens/hundreds of millions of rubles in 2-3 years, maximum 5 years, is normal and realistic. Adding to the credibility are dozens of new technologies and services for automating marketing and sales that were not available to businesses in the 20th century and that can do impressive things (for example, they can catch a client on a website, contact him and add him to the mailing list).

At the same time, the survival rate of our young companies still remains very low, and the number of bankruptcies in Russia is only growing.

An understandable result of liberal-capitalist propaganda in Russian business- a wave of so-called “business plans” with beautiful graphs, colorful arrows to the right and up, with laid down “freexpensive traps” and expensive marketing strategies in the spirit of marketing 2.0.

The essence of these business plans, most of which do not pass the sieve of investors, is best characterized by the visual picture below.

What Adizes says

It has long been noted that the development of any project, including a business project, is not exponential in nature, but goes through phases of growth, decline and new emergence. Therefore, no healthy organization can have a constantly increasing sales target. This is stated in the most detailed and clear way by the business thinker Isaac Adizes.

If we summarize Adizes’ statements about the availability and growth rates of sales in different stages life cycle organization, you can build the following table.

Life cycle stage	Are there sales or not?	Growth rate
Origin	No	No
Infancy	No or minimal	Minimum
Come on, come on	Eat	+ 50% … 300% per year
Youth	Eat	+ 30%…100% per year
Heyday	Eat	+ 10% … 30% per year
Aristocracy	Yes, interruptions are possible	- 20%… + 20% per year
Bureaucracy	Possible interruptions or lack of	+ 0% … - 30% per year

We tried to display these thoughts even more clearly, in the form of a graph. As you can see, only for the first half of an organization’s life is such a phenomenon as sales growth normal. After achieving stability, a decline in sales is at least predictable, and at most inevitable.

“4 ashrams of life” of a person and business

Surprisingly, the conclusions about the rate of sales growth in the life cycle of an organization are very precisely combined with an even more ancient teaching that, at first glance, is not at all related to business issues. Namely, with the teaching of the “four ashrams of life”, which has survived to this day in the Indian Vedas. By the way, modern Indian politicians still seriously receive professional training based on ancient Indian treatises on power, politics and economics, such as, for example, the Arthashastra.

In the Vedic system, human life is divided into four stages, which are also called “ashrams”:

Brahmacharya– or apprenticeship;
Grihastha– or the stage of making money;
Vanaprastha– or the stage of consolidation of experience;
Sannyasa– or the stage of asceticism and teaching.

Stage brahmacharya– this is a stage of learning and hardship in the name of finding one’s place in the world.

It is believed that during the period of brahmacharya a person develops good health, strong memory, vitality, clear mind, willpower, ability to persuade others. In other words, if your business behaves correctly at the initial stage of development, when it is searching for its market and honing its product, then it will develop a healthy DNA.

Further - more interesting. The next stage of life according to the Vedas is grhasta, this is the stage of creating a material basis, arrangement, taking care of home and family. Vedic texts state that grihastha is “the most important of all. Just as all living things require air for their existence, so the other three ashramas depend on the grhastha, which not only nourishes and sustains them, but also provides the opportunity for the study of the Vedas.”

After creating a material basis, after the stage of “making money”, vanaprastha begins - the stage of asceticism, sacrifice and knowledge of higher wisdom. Taking vanaprastha means leaving behind worldly concerns and settling in a place where everything is dedicated to contemplating the divine and making sense of life. Finally, the final stage of a person’s life is sannyasa - wandering asceticism, the dissemination of knowledge, wisdom and life experience through.

It turns out that the period of earning money is needed as a basis, a preparatory stage for consolidating your knowledge and experience, and then for disseminating your knowledge in the world.

How can one not remember that, for example, Bill Gates is now engaged in charity and educational activities, and almost every strong entrepreneur at the end of his career traveled around the world with lectures and socially useful projects.

“Earned x millions and closed?”

How to calculate growth rates depending on the stage of a business project?

Having looked at the purpose of each of the “ashrams of life”, it is not difficult to transfer them to the stages of the organization’s life.

“Brahmacharya for business” is the first three years, the time to search for your market niche. This is where the company and its core team truly endure hardships and gain experience;
“Grihastha for business” is the stage of scaling, the time of making money and creating the basis of the company, both material and reputational. This is the stage by which the company’s role in the business of a particular country will be judged. And therefore this is the most important stage;
“Vanaprastha in business” is the stage when the company minimizes consumption and costs, generalizes its experience and finances socially beneficial projects;
“Sannyasa for Business” is a stage when a company widely shares its experience with the younger generation of entrepreneurs and businesses.

This is just an assumption, and yet: it seems that if a company has reached its peak, it will be able to continue its life only if it enters the “business sannyas” mode, supports socially beneficial projects and shares its experience.

In this case, it will one way or another be reborn into a new one, just as parents give birth to offspring and continue their lives in children. Otherwise, like every person, she is doomed to death.

The main myth of 20th century capitalism

Perhaps the main myth of capitalism can best be illustrated with a simple and understandable picture. By the way, a huge number of top managers, strategy directors, product evangelists and other very smart and professional people pray for this and similar ones.

And, unfortunately, they pray for this picture in vain.

It doesn’t matter whether you studied geometry or physics, were involved in turning, acoustics or sports - you know that most processes in the world are cyclical and in their graphic expression they necessarily exhibit fluctuations of a wave nature.

Therefore, the beautiful and mind-pleasing model depicted in the picture above is nothing more than an unrealizable illusion. If you imagine that a person would live like this, then this is a picture of a person who died from overwork. If this is the picture of business, it is “business on steroids.”

When and why to say “stop”

Isaac Adizes, and with him many other business experts, argue that any company sooner or later comes to a phase of “stability”, from which the phase of “bureaucracy” and death later follows. And any reasonable person understands that every process is finite, which means it is more important not to try to prolong youth, but to understand in time when it is time to do something else.

The attempts of 20th century economists to find a recipe for “eternal youth” for corporations are very similar to the practices of plastic surgery: both of them often produce ugly monsters and almost always bring disappointment to the patient instead of the expected joy.