May 20, 2024

What To Do When You Reach the Breaking Point of Growing Your Business

Your business will only grow as much as you grow.

While your business goals may differ from others, most business leaders desire growth. The simple truth is that if we want our businesses to improve, we must improve ourselves.

If you’re like me, you’ve experienced the pains of growth — feeling like you’re constantly playing catch-up, being disorganized or overwhelmed, and the biggest one for me — not being able to get everything done at the pace you know your business needs to grow at the rate you want it to.

Two simple questions can change your business.

If the growth of your business has stalled – the best two questions to ask are:

1) What do I need to learn?

2) What do I need to change?

What do I need to learn?

“What do I need to learn” addresses the things you don’t know yet. Where are you, or your business, repeatedly getting stuck? It might mean you pay a coach or take a class to learn “the thing,” but it could also mean you hire someone to do a specific job who knows way more about it than you do. For me, tax preparation is something I started paying for a long time ago. Perhaps it’s HR, project management, procurement, or logistics management for you.

What do I need to change?

With growth, people and processes inevitably need to change. The question “What do I need to change?” might lead to reassigning or replacing employees, but in most cases, it means updating processes to handle growth. A more precise question might be, “Which processes have we outgrown?”

Delegate more tasks to technology.

If these questions lead you to marketing, sales, and customer service education or processes, look for ways to leverage technology and software within your processes. That way, your team can stay focused on higher-return tasks.

For example, we help home product manufacturers automate lead nurturing. Automation and AI work together to send emails and SMS messages and respond to chats across social and websites. These communications work together to keep leads informed and engaged until they are ready to purchase or interact with sales. This solution helps businesses grow beyond their marketing and sales team’s previous limits without additional employees.

Use software to manage pipelines.

Sales pipelines are common, but home product manufacturers can also utilize pipelines to onboard dealers or track order progress.

Using a pipeline to track order progress is a lifesaver for home product manufacturers that make custom products. As a customer’s order moves from one stage to the next, we set up the software platform to automatically update the customer via email, SMS, or voicemail. This service offers proactive client communication without employee time or effort.

Simplify marketing communications into one platform.

The cost alone of having multiple platforms should be reason enough to consider one communication platform. Still, for many companies, trying to integrate disparate software platforms drives them to the breaking point.

Having one platform to see and respond to messages across all your channels and manage social posts, emails, and ads makes room for growth by streamlining processes and automating lots of the “little things” that often don’t get done when everyone is busy.

Your Next Steps

1) Give yourself (and your leadership team) an hour to ask and answer the two questions: what do I need to learn? And what do I need to change? Then, review your and your leadership team’s responses to define actionable changes.

2) Consider upgrading your CRM to Atmosphere. It’s the platform we use to implement everything mentioned in this article and much more. It’s an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer service platform that will make your business run better.

You can watch videos of Atmosphere’s popular features and try Atmosphere free for ten days. Perhaps the best use of your time, however, is to schedule a walkthrough.

Companies like the flexibility of Atmosphere: you can employ it as software that your team runs, get assistance from our team as needed, or bring us on to your team to create a personalized strategy that leverages Atmosphere to work how you want your business to run and grow.

About the Author

Jason Otis is the president of Perk Brands and founder of Built for Home. Perk Brands is a digital marketing agency that partners with home product manufacturers to make their products easy to find and buy. Built for Home is a community of home product manufacturers and a resource for buyers to find products that make their lives better at home.