Business Owner Challenges

Tips to overcome challenges that face owners: Time, Sales, Systems, Focus, Cash Flow, and Employee Issues

We recently did a survey of business owners of companies with under $50 million per year in sales. One of the questions we asked them was what was the single biggest reason why you haven’t been able to grow your company as fast as you would have liked. One of the biggest limiting factors holding these business owners and their companies back was the shortage of time (35% of the respondents).

Tools to Increase Sales and Profits Every company has to generate leads; every business must convert leads into sales. Yet the painful truth is that many companies struggle to consistently generate the sales volume they need.

What would happen to your business if one of your key people (including yourself) got hurt? Most companies make the mistake of trying to scale one the one legged stool of “Team”. Now if everything stays in balance and alignment you can sit on that one legged stool, but it is a wobbly place to sit. When you scale based solely on hiring “key” people, you just create a new problem for yourself. You move the critical dependency from your shoulders to those of your key hires.

Scaling a company the right way requires that you balance keeping a clear focus on those fewer, better things that will make a leveraged difference for your company and that you stay flexible to learn and adjust as you go. On one side of the equation you have to balance the need for flexibility—markets change, opportunities arise, and tactics fail. Any action plan that is for too long of a time horizon fails to allow you the ability to morph and adapt as you go.

A 4-Step Tool to Diagnose and Fix Your Cash Flow Issues. Just when you finally feel on solid footing balancing your rapidly growing sales with systemic increases in your ability to produce and fulfill, you’ll face the next small business barrier to scaling—the Financial Barrier. Typically this will manifest in one of two ways (or for some companies—both!)

The 4 Biggest Hiring Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make Here are 4 costly mistakes entrepreneurs commonly make that hurt their companies (and how you can learn to avoid making these same mistakes yourself.)