Has Your Business Hit a Plateau? Here Are Tips to Break Through

Being a business owner is no joke. There’s no secret there. 

 

First, you get into business for yourself, thinking there will be freedom, more money, and the opportunity to be your own boss. 

 

Then, you grow your business, hire more employees, and hire more vendors or contractors to delegate your work. Before you know it, your costs are incredibly high, and you feel like an employee within your business. Then, you wonder, “Did my business hit a plateau?”

 

Every entrepreneur has been there, myself included. Before I, Jon Boles, decided to build and grow AVINTIV, I built and grew seven other brands of my own and sold one back in 2018. Business is not a walk in the park, and that’s coming from someone who has personally built and consulted on over 250 brands over the last decade.

 

If there’s one thing I can tell you, I understand your pain. I know what you’re going through regarding all the elements of owning your business. There’s not much you can tell me about what you may be going through that I haven’t gone through myself or that I haven’t seen my clients go through.

 

Before you start thinking the worst of the worst, let’s review a few things to see if your business hit a plateau and what you can do to turn things around. This blog is from my heart, as this is a topic that I can relate to personally. I will pour my heart into it and try to deliver as much value to you as possible.

Audit Your Business Before Thinking You Hit a Plateau

First, I’d like to point out that just because you haven’t reached your goals, that doesn’t equate to a business hitting a plateau. A business plateau is when your company’s growth declines over an extended period and shows no chance of growth shortly.

 

The first mistake many entrepreneurs make is setting their goals way too high. Trust me, I’d love to knock every month out of the park, but those expectations just aren’t real in today’s world.

 

Below are some things to think about to audit your business.

 

Metrics of Your Goals: What metrics are you tracking for your goals? Is it revenue? Is that revenue top-line revenue or profit, or is it COGS %? You need to know what metrics you’re tracking to set proper goals.

 

Company Goals Too High: Ensure you haven’t set your company’s goals too high. If you wrote a business plan, go back to it and see where your numbers were off.

 

Research Your Industry: Spend time researching your competition (relative size) and industry. What is the typical growth rate over the first ten years of business? How close or far off are you from those numbers?

 

Know Your Focus: I learned this one the hard way years ago. What is your focus? Do you own multiple companies or have various projects going on? Are you spread too thin? You have a pie that is worth 100%. Your family, personal life, company, and projects must fit into that 100% pie. You can’t give multiple companies your 100% at every moment of the day. Keep your main thing your main thing. Focus on one company at a time until it reaches 7-figures in revenue, or you can automate it with a management team running the day-to-day operations.

 

Finances: To successfully own and operate a business, you must know your numbers like the back of your hand and keep your finger on the pulse of the company at all times. If you don’t manage this correctly, it can most certainly lead to a plateau and then to a failed business.

 

Expenses: You should review your costs every quarter to see where you can trim the fat. During COVID-19, the management team at AVINTIV cut so much fat off the company that we didn’t even know existed. There are always ways to save money and reinvest it back into your company’s growth. Since COVID-19, our expenses have been down almost 15%, and our growth has been up over 27%.

 

Profitability: Do you have a roadmap drawn out of how much your company needs to generate in gross revenue to hit your profitability goals? Are you just tracking revenue and not net profit? If so, that’s your first mistake. We’ve consulted on businesses that generate over $1 million but only profit 10%. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that the company profits $100,000. After taxes, is that even enough money to feed your family? Ensure you run a suitable business model to meet your and your family’s needs.

 

Know Your Level of Genius: This is a hard one to grasp for entrepreneurs who love to have control over all aspects of their company. Are you a business owner who tries to do all of your marketing, branding, web design, or customer services? STOP! If those roles differ from what you were born to do or what I like to call your level of genius, then stop and hire a specialist or a digital marketing agency to fill that role. Your primary focus should be completing the role(s) you do best within your company and outsourcing everything else.

 

Find Your Ideal Customer: One of the biggest reasons most companies fail is that the owner builds a company based on their personal tastes and doesn’t consider what their ideal customer wants and needs. Your branding, messaging, website, and marketing must match what your ideal customer is looking for and be geared toward that person’s buyer journey.

I Know My Business, and We For Sure Hit a Plateau

For some of you reading this article, you checked all of the above boxes. You’ve been self-employed for as long as you can remember, and you know the basics of running a business.

 

Since this article is for all our readers, we’re not focusing on one niche. Try to shape this article around your industry and your needs.

 

As you know, many variables come into play when discussing a company’s growth or decline. When trying to determine where your business hit a plateau, we recommend reviewing the following items.

 

Financials

• Has revenue slowed down?
• Have profits slowed down as well?
• Is your company breaking even?
• Does your company have consistent cash flow?

 

Culture/Team

• Has your culture increased or decreased recently?
• How happy are your team members?
• Do you check in with them quarterly?
• Has performance gone up or down recently?
• Is your team motivated?
• Is your team engaged and passionate?

 

Client/Customer Activity

• Are your clients/customers happy?
• How many clients/customers have you gained over the last six months?
• Is that about average or less/more?
• How many clients/customers have you lost over the previous six months?
• Is that about average or less/more?
• Are your clients/customers paying on time?

 

Brand Identity

• Is your current branding and brand identity outdated?
• When’s the last time you updated your branding?
• Does your brand (website, marketing, etc.) speak to your ideal customers?
• How does your brand look compared to the competition?
• Have you changed or updated your messaging over the years?
• Does your branding match across all of your marketing (website, business cards, brochures, marketing, etc.)?

 

Marketing

• What are you currently doing for marketing?
• Are you ROI positive with your marketing campaigns? Are you tracking this?
• Does your marketing match what your ideal customers are looking to see?
• Is your website updated or outdated?
• Do people get a good or bad experience while on your website?
• Do people engage with your social media posts or content?
• Have you only built your company off word of mouth?
• Are you relying on word of mouth to continue growing your business?

 

You will get a complete picture of what’s happening if you answer these questions and develop your own. Please get in touch with us today if you’d rather have help auditing your company.

Top Reasons For a Business to Hit a Plateau

Over the last ten years, hundreds of companies have hit a plateau and are left unable to overcome the hurdle. We will go over the most frequent reasons companies hit a plateau.

Inexperienced Business Owners

This section is one of the most complex reasons to admit why your company might be hitting a plateau. Hey, we’ve all been there. 

 

You don’t start your first company being Steve Jobs; even he went through a crazy journey building Apple. If you don’t understand the fundamentals of running a business, accounting, finances, legal, sales, marketing, and so on, you will have many hurdles to overcome. 

 

Hurdles are what some of us entrepreneurs live for, though. I’ve overcome more than you could imagine getting to where I am today. Most see it as an overnight success. They didn’t see the years of loneliness, fear, insecurities, and worries about failing every day. 

 

You have to have the grit to get to the finish line, and then once you cross it, you set another finish line further out.

Outdated Branding & Brand Identity

For your business to succeed, you must understand your ideal customer. A perfect customer is an imaginary person who is the ideal person who would buy your products/services. Everything about them gets you excited, and it’s the reason why your company exists. 

 

You can’t be everything to everyone. You need to reach one or two ideal customers from the get-go. If you’re a B2B business, what industries would you be servicing? If you’re B2C, who will buy your products/services? This task is much more complicated than it sounds, so don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t figured this out yet. Most clients we work with hire us for a brand workshop, so our strategists can complete this for them with a high success rate.

 

Once you understand who your ideal customer is, you then need to mold your brand identity and everything externally around that person or people. For example, If your perfect customer is 35 years old and she loves a soft, girly touch with hints of light blue and pink, and your website and branding are yellow and blue, you won’t convert her. 

 

Your branding and brand identity must mesh well with your ideal customer, or they won’t even look at you. If you mold your branding to what that ideal customer is looking for, they will instantly feel a bit of trust with you as they will resonate with your colors, logo, and overall messaging.

 

Your brand messaging, how you talk about yourself, and your offer will need to be crafted around that ideal customer. We’ve worked with clients who have had successful companies, but they didn’t realize that their perfect customer had been underneath their noses all along. The issue was that their branding and messaging weren’t aligned with that ideal customer. They grew their business from word of mouth but had no success with growing outside of that, which is where we came in to help.

 

Stop making branding decisions based on what you, as a business owner, are like unless you are your ideal customer; then go for it. You aren’t the one shopping at your business; you’re building it for your customers. Put the ego aside and create the most fantastic brand for your future customers.

Outdated Website and Customer Experience

Prospects check out your website before making a purchase. As one of the top web design agencies in the United States, we completely understand the significance of having a mobile-responsive website that provides a phenomenal customer experience.

 

Over 57% of internet users have said they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile website. Another wild statistic says that 88% of all online consumers are unlikely to return to a website after experiencing a poor user experience. 

 

It’s almost 2025, and your company will soon be extinct if your website is outdated. What happened with COVID-19 forced most businesses to pivot to online only.

 

To succeed in this new world, you need an elegant website designed with your ideal customer’s journey in mind. The look, feel, and overall flow of the website must match the buyer’s journey. 

 

Is your current website easy to navigate? Can you get to where you want to go and checkout with 3-4 clicks? Is your website mobile responsive? These are all questions that you need to start asking yourself.

 

If you need help auditing your current website, please contact us today. We’d be more than happy to help you.

Outdated Marketing or No Marketing at All

We’ve worked with many clients who were able to grow their businesses organically with referrals and word of mouth. Honestly, that’s how we built AVINTIV for the first three years. We never really needed to push marketing or advertising, as our clients did that for us. But we hit a certain point where we knew that in order to hit our future goals, we would need to start investing more money into our own branding, marketing, and advertising.

 

I love the saying, “What got you here won’t get you there.” It’s happened with every company I’ve ever built or consulted. You finally hit a certain point and put everything you had into getting your company to a certain level. You were happy for a few minutes and then set more significant goals, but something happened.

 

You failed to realize that the tactics you used to reach your current level wouldn’t help you achieve your new goals. This realization has led to some business owners thinking they’ve hit a plateau.

 

If you aren’t marketing your company properly, you will definitely hit a plateau. Now, it all depends on your goals, and some business owners are content with where they’re at, but if you’re reading this article, then you’re not one of those people.

 

As a digital marketing agency, we run into this problem quite often. We get so busy helping our clients grow that we have pushed our needs aside with every new project. 

 

As a company, we have dedicated “x” amount of time every month to our internal needs, whether branding, content, marketing, or website updates; we make the time for it.

 

Steps to Break Past Your Plateau

If you’ve made it this far in the article, you are eager to find out how to break past your plateau, or you’ve realized there is much homework you need to do before you can make that call.

 

For those of you who know you’ve hit a plateau and are eager to find solutions to break past it, keep reading. We are listing a few strategies and solutions that should help you break past your plateau.

Audit Your Company

Reread everything we wrote up top about auditing your company and do it. Open up a Google Doc or sheet of paper and start reviewing every department in your company. Go from operations to finance and cover every department of your business. Picture it as deep cleaning your house. You need to get your toothbrush and magnifying glass and get real close. 

 

Turning over these rocks in your company can be painful, but would you instead lower your ego and find out why your company isn’t growing, or keep your pride and fail two years down the road?

Research or Hire a Strategy Team

The next step is to research or hire a strategy team that has done this before. You will want to examine your ideal customers, their needs, your competition, and the overall economics. 

 

Can your perfect customer afford your products compared to your competitors? Is your pricing too low, too high, or ideal? 

 

Treat your business as if you were a customer. Go to one of your marketing channels and follow the same journey your customer goes on from start to finish. Make a purchase on your website or in your location. How seamless was that journey for you? Would you shop at your company?

 

List what changes need to be made or enhanced to give your ideal customer a better experience.

Brand & Identity Overhaul

60% of businesses that come to us when they hit a plateau do so for the same reason: their branding, website, and overall brand identity are outdated, and their ideal customers are not finding them online. Or, if they are finding them online, they aren’t turning into customers as they don’t relate to the current brand.

 

Updating your branding doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, but your branding and brand identity are the most essential pieces of your company. 

 

If you hire your buddy from down the road to build you a cheap website and hire a designer from a stock logo website, then there’s no wonder why your brand has hit a plateau. Customers can tell if you’ve spent the money on your brand. Why would they trust the products or services you’re offering if you haven’t?

 

Since 2020, there has been more competition than ever. Much capital has been injected into local franchises and eCommerce stores that are competing after your ideal customers. There are ways to compete with them while having a smaller budget. 

 

Just see for yourself. We have a client in the cannabis space who is privately owned and competing against billion-dollar companies. You don’t have to be the biggest one to win.

 

Below are some examples of a brand overhaul we did for a local periodontist.

 

Invest in the Right Marketing Channels

Once you’ve accomplished the recommendations above, it’s time to talk about marketing. The world has changed due to COVID-19, but that hasn’t stopped companies from marketing. If anything, intelligent companies have put even more money behind their marketing to beat out their competition.

 

We are big believers in making your house a home first. We specialize in managing social media, growing Instagram pages, Facebook Ads, and SEO. 

 

Over the years, we have realized that the number one way we had the most success for our clients was by providing SEO and content creation.

 

 

If you have a $10,000/month budget to run Facebook Ads or PPC ads, you can dabble with those advertising channels. If you don’t, like many small — to medium-sized businesses, don’t even test the waters.

 

We have studied and analyzed the different types of buyers who buy through social advertising and organic routes. Organic routes (SEO, content creation) always have a higher customer lifetime value (LTV).

 

If you don’t have the capital to hire an SEO agency, feel free to utilize our FREE blogs to help you make your own SEO enhancements. To best understand SEO, we recommend reading the articles in order from top to bottom.

 

SEO Articles & Tips:

• SEO: What It Is, and Why It’s Essential For Your Business
• What is On-page SEO?
• What is Off-page SEO?
• Why You Should Invest in SEO
• How Much Should SEO Cost?
• The 3 Biggest SEO Trends for 2019
• The Ultimate Guide to Meta Tags
• The Ultimate Guide to Meta Titles
• The Ultimate Guide to Meta Descriptions
• What is Link Building?: What You Need to Know
• 5 Need to Know SEO Tips for Dentists and Periodontists for 2020

In Conclusion

Starting a business is one of the hardest things someone will do in their lifetime. It is a lot to think about, not only starting a business but also maintaining it and growing it year after year. 

I hope this article has helped you discover if your business has hit a plateau and how to break through it. If you have any questions or want help breaking past your plateau, please contact us today.