Strategy

Do You Have Enough Business…and Is it Really Enough?

It’s often said that a business is either growing or dying. And while that might be true, the vast number of businesses exist in a place where they’re doing enough…enough to pay the bills, enough to keep the doors open, enough to live a comfortable life.

If you’re one of those businesses in the middle, a business that has enough but isn’t dying and isn’t really growing, why are you in that place? And when you examine why you are in that place, it’s important to look at it from both sides.

First, why are you not dying? What is it that you do well as a business that keeps customers coming back to you? Maybe your product is the best. Perhaps your customer service is second to none. Maybe you serve a niche that nobody else fills. What are the things that you’re doing to cause the money to keep coming in?

Secondly, examine why you aren’t growing. Have you saturated the market? Is your location or reach too small? Does your process waste time and/or money? Is your product second rate?

There are probably a number of accurate answers to the questions above, but question previously posed rings true for almost every business existing in this middle ground of “enough”…PROCESS.

In business, growth is much like the human experience. The clothes that fit when you were a toddler (or a new business owner) won’t fit when you’re an adolescent. The food you needed as a baby is not the same as the nourishment you need as a teen. How you get to school as kindergartner is likely very different than how you get to school as a high schooler.

Often, your potential growth is crippled by process because making a dozen cupcakes in your kitchen to sell at a bake sale is much different than making 200 dozen cupcakes every week to feed your customer base. Getting information to your two salespeople is drastically different than disseminating information to a national sales force.

Having a process with growth in mind eliminates questions that waste your time and money. “How do we do XYZ?” or “When do we take the next step?” are questions that no longer have to be asked because the process answers them. This gives your team, or employees, the ability to function freely on their own, much as you would as the business owner or decision maker.

If you’re stuck in that wobbling world of “enough”, look at your process. Or betting yet, let the team at DBM Grow take a look at your process. It may be the very reason that your “enough” isn’t turning into “more”.

5 May, 2019
Dustin Fickbohm
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