What Lies Keep You From Expanding Your Business?

As co-founder of Measurable Solutions, I have been delivering our introductory marketing course for a few years now. During this time we’ve had several hundred business owners come through our facility: some are large and some are small. What is interesting is that I notice there are certain characteristics that all of them have in common to some degree, and I’d like to make them known to you in case perhaps you haven’t recognized any of them in yourself or in your own business.

Commonly, a business owner has many things that take his or her attention away from the actual expansion of the organization. The first thing to recognize is that the attention is taken away from the expansion of the organization – until that is realized none of the other barriers will be in view. It’s not necessarily that business owners want a large facility or multiple facilities, or their name in lights or a shrine built to them, it’s just what we commonly find is what most people want is the ability to run their business from a distance. And many people are in business for two years or twenty years, and they have not been able to achieve that goal. There are some of you that have, and that’s fantastic.

We find that in the area of expanding a business stably there are a lot of reasons why this problem has never been addressed. These are what I call the lies that keep you from expanding your business. 

One common lie that I find quite interesting is the number of business owners who come into our company and state that they do practically nothing to expand their business as if they are proud of it, in some bizarre way. I certainly expect that all of us should be doing good work, and if you aren’t at least achieving that end goal of delivering an exchangeable product to your customers, you should just quit and do something else. But assuming that everybody is delivering an exchangeable product and their business standards are high, I’m always shocked to hear that a large number of owners do nothing at all to expand their business. I usually hear things like, “Our customers know who we are and they keep coming back — word of mouth has gotten us this far so I see no reason to change and we have been marketing our business this way for years.” What’s usually underneath all that is they don’t know what to do to market promote and expand their business so they do nothing and hope that their products and customer service will somehow keep the numbers going up. 

Another lie that we hear very often as a reason for not expanding the business is being overwhelmed. Now, it is an interesting thing that whenever you propose a solution to anyone who is overwhelmed already with things to do or problems in life, they won’t implement it. I mean you could be leading them straight to the fountain of youth, but they would deny it and go in an opposite direction. I find commonly that overwhelm is nothing more than an inability to recognize the important things from the unimportant things. This is easily resolved but not until overwhelm at the top is handled.  Once the owner can take a moment to really look at what is going on in the business he can see what is important and what is not important.  Obviously this is a very important point to address and handle.

Sometimes I hear another lie that holds a business down, “I don’t want to be too busy.” Now, I can understand how if you were the only one in your business and it got busier, that you personally would be busier. But in the most successful businesses that I am familiar with, the owner doesn’t work more hours, he or she works less. The staff doesn’t necessarily work more hours, they just don’t have any downtime. It’s run efficiently, its run smarter. When someone tells me that they don’t want to be too busy, what they are telling me is they are already overwhelmed. And what is interesting, is if you take your production volume from where it is presently, and cut it in half, just cut it in half right now, would you work half time? Or would you work frantically full time plus try to figure out what you could do to get the numbers back up to where they are right now? My guess is that you would be working frantically. Now, if you knew exactly what to do, and what are the vital steps that you must take in order to turn that thing around, then you have executive prowess. If you work 60 hours a week and you are not able to get your stats into a higher range and increase the volume in your organization, then it’s likely you are doing either things that shouldn’t be done or you’re doing trivial functions that quite honestly don’t expand your business. The most difficult thing to spot is what are the most important and vital steps to take. I usually don’t hear a business owner tell me that “my numbers dropped by one half, and I’m working about 60 hours a week doing trivial stuff  that doesn’t work, but I’m going in there and I’m giving it my all nevertheless.” Most owners consider that they are doing exactly what is necessary to boom the business. But if the stats are not rising, they are not doing the vital and correct steps. Plain and simple.

Expanding your organization is not as complicated as you may think. It doesn’t have to cause more time, trouble, or stress, but there are vital steps that must be taken to make that happen. And a little bit of time is necessary on the part of the owner, to step away from day-to-day production to an executive responsibility to make that happen. Those who have done that successfully look back and wonder what took them so long to make the decision and take on the viewpoint of an owner.

The business is supposed to enhance your life in some way. You decided to go out on your own, because you wanted to be your own boss. I think what you ought to do is to consider doing it professionally. Be a professional executive and a professional owner. Take on both and do them both well because you may have your own goals that you would like to obtain as a business owner, personal and financial. But it is the responsibility of the owner to take care of his or her staff, so whatever you need to make financially or you have as a goal that would make you happy, you better double or triple it, because it isn’t going to be enough to take care of your staff and provide what those individuals would like to achieve working with and working for you. Your goal needs to be bigger.

If you have a successful business that is doing well and is taking good care of you financially, but you still feel stressed because you have to think about it or worry about it or fret about it, or you have to show up every day to see how things are going, then what you need to do is to improve the skill of those staff who actually run the organization day to day as executives so that they can run it for you. That is really how you get distance from your organization. Have a competent team who knows how to get things done and can make the practice grow in your absence. We can help you. We do it every day. It’s very simple, it is not complicated. The only decision that has to be made is that there is a desire and a willingness to go into action on the part of the owner to expand his or her organization. We take it from there.