Episode 174 - Break the Plateau: Strategies for Sustained Business Growth

 Good day and welcome to The Budding Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host Randy Bridges. In each episode we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away. 

We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders who are shaking and making things happen in their industry. It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level. So get comfortable and let's jump right in. 

All right, all right, we are on episode 174 of the podcast. Today is Friday, November 22nd, 2024. Looking into our daily agenda here, we're going to be going through a topic on overcoming revenue stagnation, how to create a strategy for sustained growth. 

We're going to look at a quote from the management consultant Peter Drucker, and then we're going to focus in on our topic specifically on overcoming revenue stagnation. If your revenues plateau despite all your best efforts, you're finding yourself working harder, you're going to be trying new tactics, and unfortunately when this is going on the needle doesn't move. It's very frustrating, it's exhausting, and even to a lot of people that have been doing this for a while, it's downright demoralizing.

But here's the good news, there's a way out, and today we're going to explore how to create a sustainable growth strategy that produces measurable results for you without burning yourself out. For our quote of the day, let's turn to the great management consultant Peter Drucker. He once said, the best way to predict the future is to create it, and we're dealing with this topic on stalled revenue, right? Anything that's just kind of sitting there, the revenue stagnation, and if you're facing that, you want to create your own future around how you make the money that you're making, and how you're working it, and it's actually a pretty simple process. 

We're going to go through that in our business strategies today. Number one, we'll cover identifying the root cause of revenue stagnation. You know, why are you stuck, and what's really happening behind the scenes.

Number two is building a growth strategy. We want to look at the elements of a sustainable plan, and how to create one. It wouldn't make any sense if we just talked about the problem all day long, and not talked about how you would go building a strategy to resolve it. 

Number three is measuring your progress in adapting. Keep in mind we need two sides of that one. We want to track our growth, but also we want to be able to pivot when necessary, and the fourth one is actionable steps you can take right now. 

We want to help you jump start your business growth, and as we move into areas like the election, and things like this that change everything, and that are going to adjust how not just our business works, but the companies that are around us, our clients, and customers. We want to make sure that we have a way to jump start our business to the kind of growth we want. As we look at the root causes of this kind of stagnation, there are three primary ones, and they all affect us differently, but most companies are affected by this heavily. 

The first one is market saturation. This is just too many people all in the same space, all trying to do the same thing, all trying to get some leg up on the competition, and we know that this is happening because we start seeing declining customer acquisition. It's harder and harder to get clients even though you're doing better and better marketing efforts.

Also our competitors are offering similar products or services in the same space, and that alone will create a crowded field. This is that red ocean concept that blue ocean strategy talks about. We're also getting fewer repeat customers, clients, referrals. 

These all affect us, and they come from this market saturation. Looking at your market saturation helps. You can expand your research into new markets, demographics. 

This is the blue ocean concept. This is what Russell Brunson is talking about when he's discussing fishing in someone else's pond. You're going into an area that is not just your own. 

You're actually going into an area that might not be a one-for-one match that your competitors would be able to reach. This is now allowing you to position yourself as a unique solution in a new space where you differentiate your business, and you reignite your growth you didn't know you even had. Another area of root cause is inefficient operations. 

I know a lot of business owners don't really care too much about their operations. They rely on an operations person, an operator, to handle a lot of that. The challenge is that when these operators are inside your business, they're only seeing it from the inside. 

It's very difficult for them to get out, so a lot of times you're going to be seeing things like bottlenecks in your service delivery. You're not quite sure why, or you're getting missed deadlines, and there's a lot more customer complaints coming through. This is how you know this is going on, and often you're finding yourself doing a lot of manual work. 

Maybe not you, but certainly your people. Automations would save you a lot more time. Now the question is, is it going to provide greater value? And the idea is to give your own people the tools. 

The systems run the business. Your people manage the systems that are happening, and this is going to give you increased efficiency, higher profitability, and ideally a smoother experience, right? The customer experience, customer journey needs to be reflective for both your team and your customers. And the third root cause, which is a very common one, is misaligned offerings. 

This happens with a lot of new companies. I know I did it when I first came into business going in the consulting model. I tried to do what everyone else was doing, and the problem was that I was coming to them with a message that they didn't understand. 

It wasn't something they could see, and their problems were not reflective of what I was bringing in. And so this is where you can kind of identify it, because your clients and your customers are asking for customization and solutions that you don't provide. Maybe your competitor does, but they're asking for it, whether you're able to deliver it or not. 

You're also seeing lower conversion rates, even with increased lead generation. Your marketing efforts have to be aligned with, again, what the customer is calling the problem that they see. And you're also going to look and see that feedback indicates some confusion about your value proposition, right? So these are all great signs that you're offering. 

Whatever you're doing is misaligned with the people you're targeting, and that could be because you're targeting the wrong people. I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, and she was running into the same situation. She's like, I know what I'm doing, and I want to talk with these people, and they just don't care. 

And I'm like, well, you're not speaking to the problem as they see it. You're speaking to the problem as you see it. And so when you're offering solve the right problems for the right people, you're going to naturally attract more clients. 

It's just going to happen. Realigning your offerings is going to improve the client satisfaction. You're going to get better retention, better referrals, and your natural word of mouth will grow. 

Now you have to combine this with several other things. Let's talk about building a sustainable growth strategy. We want to discuss a little about why it matters, and then going about creating a growth strategy that's both achievable and scalable. 

Remember scaling, and we'll talk about this later on, but scaling is about growing the thing that already works. You don't just walk in and scale a business and say, hi, I'm scaling today. That doesn't work that way. 

What it is, is you take the thing that works, and now you begin tweaking it and adjusting it so that more and more of it can be more effective. And one of the easy ways to do this is start with a clear vision. Go back to what you're solving. 

It acts as a guidepost, and it helps you to make decisions that align with long-term objectives. Look back a couple of episodes. We discussed vision in pretty good detail about building your own and doing this, and I did a workshop on this recently.

And the idea is, if you can make decisions that align with your long-term objectives, and then unify your team, your customers and clients are going to all help you and your team work towards the same outcomes. 

Now another part of your strategy is defining your competitive advantage. You hear a lot about this. A lot of people use this term, but you have to understand what makes you different. It's kind of like that old interview question, so of all the people I could hire, why should I hire you? 

And there's a strategy to answering that, that I've used many, many times, and it's the same way with dealing with clientele. You're gonna set first a statement that is, this is probably what you're going to find. 

It's going to be A, B, and C. How close am I? Right? We're going to get a temperature check in our conversation. Is it a 1? Is it a 10? Where is it somewhere in between? 

It's a dialogue now that you open to be able to test that, and to make sure you're talking to somebody that actually sees things the way that you think they see them. Right? And then now you take that and you say, well, I do all of that, and beyond what they're doing, I do X, Y, Z. Okay? 

This is designed to attract the right clients that actually know you understand their problem, and you want to also reduce the churn.

Competitive advantage will really keep people from leaving you, because they're clear and they understand what you bring to the table that's unique. That generally, if we do our Blue Ocean strategy correctly, generally we're working in an area that we don't have competition. Alex Hormozi calls it a team of one. 

Right? It's where you get a strong competitive advantage and an edge that allows you to both command higher prices without losing business. Finally, and this is where we talked about scale, you want to focus on scale after you lock in the growth opportunities and strategies in your business. See, scalable opportunities let you grow your revenue without proportionally increasing your costs or workload. 

So that means you've got to have a very clear view on what your strategy is going to do and how it's going to help you. Then you're going to start building on it. It's kind of like you would never add a second story to a home without first shoring up the foundation and making sure it's capable of supporting the extra weight. 

We'll be going to, instead of four by four posts, we'll use three of them to give corner joists all that much more leverage to be able to work together. So looking at this in scale, you might be launching maybe a new product that complements your core service. You want to think of this in three dimensions.

Business does not just scale wide and high. It also scales deep. If you're complementing your core services and your core products and your core things that you're doing, and you automate your workflow to handle the increased demand that's going to come, a lot of times you're going to find the scale is natural. 

In fact, a lot of people say the only way to know when to scale is when your customers are telling you, when your clients are saying, I need you to provide more. And finally, what we want to do is create a roadmap with milestones. A lot of people create roadmaps and that's good, but going back to project management 101, you have to have big rocks and small rocks, not pebbles, but you can't just have big, huge boulder at the end and call that that's what we're doing. 

You have to have smaller rocks and smaller stones to be able to achieve it along the way so that it's manageable and measurable. Again, this is basic project management. You might already know it, but what happens is a lot of people overlook it because they forget that they're looking backwards and forwards at the same time. 

You have to know how far you've come in order to appreciate how far you're going. So you want to give your team clear targets to work towards and yourself, right? I mean, if you're not achieving targets, you're not actually doing anything for your business. You can't manage what you can't measure, and we want to be able to boost accountability and focus. 

Now that we've built our strategy, we want to start measuring our progress and adapting, and we're going to go a little quicker through this because I really want to get down to the actionable steps and focus on that. There are really four parts to measuring progress. There's tracking key performance indicators that give you real-time insights into your business's health. 

Next comes conducting regular reviews. We want to make sure that we can adjust our goals, our tactics, and our focus areas based upon what's working and what's not. Third one, gather the team and customer feedback. 

We want to actively seek feedback that fosters a culture of transparency. And finally, in this part, adapt based on results. If you're not seeing results, you're doing something wrong. 

If your KPRs are the right ones, they're going to tell you where you're making it happen. You want it to be relevant and effective. For example, if your channel underperforms in your marketing, you want to relocate some different resources occasionally, okay? So let's jump into the actionable steps.

This is where most of the people are looking at it going, okay, I really want to make a difference and there are five of them that are really good for a starting point. Number one, analyze your current revenue streams. What have you done over the past 12 months? What's your trends on income growth? Where are they? Breaking down your revenue by service or product line identifies your top performers and those are the ones you're going to want to focus on.

And we want those offerings with high costs but low returns out of there. The result of this is you know where to focus your efforts and where to cut back. And that allows you to channel your resources into the most profitable areas. 

Number two, revisit your ideal client profiles. This is something that I have a lot of people that don't do. They don't really know ideally who their client is. 

And so the easy way to do that is you go back and interview a few of your best clients to understand what they value the most of what you do. And then you can update your ideal client avatar with what you learn from them. This allows you to align your services and marketing efforts with these updated profiles making sure the message you're using is going to target the right clients customers and it's going to ensure that your efforts resonate and that's going to bring in better engagement and conversions. 

The third thing is to outline your growth strategy. Obviously smart goals is the key here but you also want to make sure that you can identify one or two key initiatives to focus on over the next quarter. Creating a timeline for executing those initiatives with the milestones to track the progress is going to get you very far and it's going to allow you to have a focused strategy that gives you clarity and momentum helping you avoid burnout while driving results. 

Burnout will kill your company absolutely destroy it. The fourth step is streamline and automate. Now a lot of people say well I don't know where to and I don't know how to. 

Well start with the repetitive tasks that might be able to be automated. Is your invoicing being handled? Is your email follow-up being handled? Sometimes you can take these repetitive tasks and move them out to an outsourced environment might be actually better and more cost effective for you. You also want to research the tools that fit your needs and integrate seamlessly into your existing systems. 

I see it over and over where people are you know they're looking at how they use their tools and they're using a whole bunch of different tools that don't work together right. If you can't make them work effectively you've got a major problem. But essentially the automation you wanted to increase your efficiency and your scalability.

So we have to focus on what works first and that's going to allow you to focus strategic growth as your key rather than looking at daily operations. And the fifth step of doing this is again review regularly. You want to do monthly check-ins. 

You want to do weekly stand-ups. You want to measure everything against your goals. This is again basic project management but you might be surprised at how many people simply don't do it because they don't see the value in it.

The idea is to adjust your strategy based on the market trends and internal performance you actually can measure and see okay. And celebrate your wins right. Keep your team motivated and doing this will ensure that your business adapts to challenges while staying focused on the long-term growth. 

So we looked at this today as our agenda. We covered identifying the root causes of revenue stagnation. We looked at building a common strategy for growth.

We looked at measuring progress and adapting. Did that very quickly. And finally five actionable steps that you can take right now to jumpstart your business growth. 

That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. If you want to keep the conversation going or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. 

And hey don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. For the budding entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. 

Take care and we'll see you back here next week.