You’re working smarter and harder than ever, yet revenue has been the same over the last few months. Sound familiar? The truth is, many businesses go through a phase where their growth comes to a halt, regardless of their efforts. This phase is called the revenue plateau. This phase is a lot more common than we think. And, it often leads to business stagnation, excessive burnout, and even lost opportunities. It is one of the leading causes of business failures, especially when not handled properly.
If you are in these shoes, you are likely wondering why your business can’t grow anymore, and you feel like you’ve hit a revenue wall in your business. The first thing you should know is that it doesn’t immediately equate to business failure. Instead, it is a pointer that you need help scaling your business. The help in growing your business might also mean the need for a growth consultant for your business. Growth consultants help with strategic growth planning, and their goal is to help you overcome growth plateaus and increase business revenue. A growth consultant would not only help you overcome revenue plateaus but also assist your business in scaling strategically. In this guide, we will show you what causes stagnation in businesses and how requesting for business growth consultant services can help you enter a new era of business growth.
Why Businesses Get Stuck at the Same Revenue
Before we discuss the need for a growth consultant, let us consider the reasons why most businesses remain stagnant at the same revenue level for a long time. More than 80% of the time, business stagnation is caused by a combination of inefficiencies and ineffective strategies. These inefficiencies and misaligned strategies are often hard to notice from within, as the business owner. These inefficiencies are the most common causes of a revenue plateau, and here is a listed of the common ones:
Operational Inefficiencies
One of the goals of every business is to expand. The challenge with expansion is that as a business grows, its operations become increasingly complex. Over time, you’ll realize that what once worked is no longer as effective. Growth and expansion demand streamlined workflows, upgraded systems, and proper delegation. And the absence of these prevents you and your team from focusing on scaling and high-leverage growth activities. This makes you more focused on damage control and managing problems, at the expense of the growth of your business. Operational inefficiencies limit your productivity level, which would, in the end, limit or stagnate your business growth.
Lack of Scalable Systems
It’s one thing to create a system for your business; it’s another to build one that lasts. As an entrepreneur, relying solely on manual processes will eventually lead to a situation were your business is not growing anymore. What worked during the start-up phase is unlikely to sustain your business as it expands. And when creating systems—whether operational or management systems, your top priority is scalability. From customer relationship to project management, the tools or software you use matter as much. This is because growth is certain, but without a quality operational system, you will miss out on revenue.
Marketing Strategies That Don’t Scale
Small businesses rely on word of mouth, networking, and referrals to grow. But as it grows, referrals would not yield as many results anymore. This is because it is not a scalable marketing strategy. You are hanging the revenue of your business on a system that cannot attract and convert leads without your input. And the truth is, you need a predictable and replicable marketing strategy to increase your revenue as you grow. This means that your strategy must be developed on data-driven processes that can be replicated and repeated. Moreover, they should also be automated if possible. If you are not doing this, this is why your business growth is stunted.
Founder Burnout or Strategic Blind Spots
As the founder of a thriving business, you wear multiple hats and fill many shoes. One day, you are an accountant. The next day, you are involved in customer management or even trying to develop new marketing strategies. It gets worse if you are in the start-up phase. This is because with time, you would get burned out, and you would lose sight of the bigger picture. This is what causes strategic blind spots. You become too focused on too many things to the point where you cannot identify what is holding your business back.
And most of the time, without external feedback from other people, clients, or consultants, you would remain oblivious. This would make it almost impossible to create a system that can create sustainable growth. Knowing the reason businesses are stuck at the same revenue is one step to finding a solution. Hence, the need for a growth consultant to help you identify these challenges in your business. And beyond identifying them, they help with strategic growth planning to move your business beyond the revenue ceiling.
The Cost of Stagnant or Declining Revenue
When your business can’t scale past the current revenue, it not only affects the financial growth of your business. It affects pretty much everything else. From the loss of better opportunities to emotional fatigue for founders, the revenue plateau is a scary phase. Below are the other ways declining revenue affects your business.
Opportunity Cost of Stagnation
Each month your revenue declines, you lose more than just profit. When growth stalls, you miss out on potential clients eager to invest and on untapped market share. Meanwhile, competitors who invest in growth strategies outpace you and scale rapidly. In business, time is one resource you can’t afford to waste.
Loss of Market Share, Talent, and Momentum
Stagnation in business not only causes missed business opportunities, but it also leads to a loss of drive and momentum to work. Think of it this way: working hard without yielding visible results. And your employees expect to progress as they are working. Your investors and clients also need to see the results of their investments. But when your business has flatlined, your employees lose momentum to continue with you. Loss of momentum would lead to your top talents looking for greener pastures with your other thriving businesses. It also causes a dip in the energy across your team, which would further lead to a shrinkage in customer base.
Emotional and Mental Fatigue For Founders
As a founder going through a revenue plateau, you would definitely go through emotional and mental fatigue. You would constantly find yourself doubting your vision and dealing with anxiety. Unanswered questions like “why can’t my business grow anymore?” would affect your confidence level. This would further affect how you lead your business and communicate with your team members. Does it end there? No, it doesn’t. The emotional fatigue also makes it difficult for you to make better business decisions and plan for your business’s future. It also makes it hard for you to take the necessary risks for your business.
If you are encountering a revenue plateau in your business, it is costing you more than just declining revenue. And if you come out of this, you need to actively deal with the growth barriers to grow and scale. This further brings us to the need for a business growth consultant.
What a Growth Consultant Actually Does
A business growth consultant helps businesses, regardless of their size, to scale strategically and make better decisions for their businesses. They offer you valuable insights and also support you with the execution so that you can overcome a growth plateau. A growth consultant offers business growth strategies if you are stuck in business growth. Here’s what they typically do.
- They Diagnose Growth Bottlenecks
Through data analysis and operational auditing, they identify the root cause of business stagnation and revenue plateau. Whether it is poor marketing strategies or poor scalable systems, they diagnose the problem and proffer solutions. This is necessary because growth consultants are professionally trained to see why you can’t scale past your current revenue. They are your eyes when you have strategic blind spots.
- They Refine Business Models For Scalability
A business growth consultant understands that not every business model will scale. With this understanding, they analyze your business offers and delivery structures to determine if it is suitable for long-term expansion. They do this so that you don’t spend time and resources on structures that would fail you in the future. After analyzing and assessing these models, they help you to restructure them into a model that works better for your business. It is called business model optimization—optimizing your business models to achieve scalable results. This is how they deal with the revenue plateau before your business starts to flatline.
- They Build Customized Growth Strategies
In the business sector, what grows one business might not grow another. In fact, a strategy that worked for you in your startup phase might not work as you are expanding. Growth consultants understand this. That’s why they develop business growth strategies that are based on your goals, your capacity, and market size. The idea is to give you a strategy that works and produces desired results. This way, your business would grow at a steady pace and even surpass the revenue ceiling.
- They Align Team, Systems, and Strategy
Imagine your team does not understand your business system or the strategy used in scaling. This is one of the biggest challenges to business growth. Because your team, system, and strategy need to be in sync to achieve results and scale. This is where a growth consultant comes in. They exist to ensure that your team understands the how and the why of your business. This way, everyone works towards a common goal. They not only put a workable structure in place, but they also adopt tools to help streamline operations. This way, the workflow is easy for team members, and goals are easy to achieve. This would also help to overcome the growth plateau.
In general, growth consultants are necessary for entrepreneurs who are stuck in business growth and need help scaling their business. They provide a growth strategy to fix a small business’s plateau.
Strategic Areas Where Growth Consultants Unlock Revenue
To help your business scale and overcome a revenue plateau, business growth consultants focus on the following areas:
Revenue Stream Diversification
One way to unlock revenue is to ensure that your business is not dependent on one source of revenue. This is because it is very risky and unhealthy to rely on one product for business revenue. Growth consultants help you identify other ways your business can generate revenue to scale and grow. It could either be repackaging your services or launching new offers. Whichever way, growth consultants ensure that you increase business revenue by creating systems that support long-term scalability.
Sales Process Optimization
A business growth consultant studies and analyzes your sales process to identify what works and eliminate what doesn’t. They also identify what is missing and ensure that your sales techniques align with your business goals and customer needs. With this alignment, there would be fewer drop-offs in your sales funnel, resulting in increased revenue. For a business stuck in growth, optimizing the sales process guarantees an increase in business revenue at a lower cost.
Scalable Marketing Framework
One of the reasons a business can’t scale past its current revenue is an unscalable marketing strategy. And business growth consultants understand this. To help increase and unlock your business revenue, they switch from random marketing plans to marketing strategies that can scale. They design replicable market systems that include paid advertisements, content marketing, and brand positioning to support your business growth. This leads to a consistency in lead generation, which results in revenue generation without excessive input from you as the founder.
Operational Scalability (Team, Tech, Automation)
Operational scalability is as important as a good marketing strategy when it comes to unlocking and increasing your business revenue. This is because revenue generation isn’t only tied to more sales. Your workforce, business tools, technology stack, and management system matter just as much. A growth consultant ensures that your team and business tools are in proper sync, working together to achieve sustainable results. They restructure internal workflows with the introduction of automation tools to increase efficiency and simplify the hiring and team management system.
Pricing Model Optimization
The price of your product or service can positively or negatively impact the growth of your business. To unlock revenue, business growth consultants access your pricing strategy, considering your revenue goals, customer value, costing, and competitors. They also work on rebranding your products and services to enhance their perceived value. This is so that your clients are willing to pay for your offers.
Have you hit a revenue wall in your business? Do you feel stuck in business growth? Does it feel like your business can’t scale past its current revenue? It is a sign that you need a business growth consultant for your business. Check out this guide on why you need a growth consultant as an entrepreneur to evaluate your needs.
ROI of Hiring a Growth Consultant
Are you concerned about the cost of hiring a growth consultant? Are you scared that it might not pay off? We are here to tell you that the results are as substantial as your investment. Here is what you stand to gain from hiring a growth consultant for your business.
Short-term Clarity, Long-term Scale
Think of it this way: moving from confusion to clarity because you now have a clear, actionable roadmap. This clarity comes from the strategic growth planning. This is one of the biggest benefits of hiring a growth consultant for your business. With this, you not only make progress for some time, but you also get to build a sustainable future for your business.
Data-Backed Decisions Instead of Guesswork
With a business growth consultant, you wouldn’t have to run your business based on a trial-and-error system. A growth consultant guides you with a business growth strategy that is tested and trusted to deliver sustainable results. They study your business model to know what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be modified. This not only increases your chances of scaling; it helps your business grow and scale like it should.
Freed Up Founder Time and Energy
As a founder used to wearing many hats, which ends up dragging the pace of business growth, this is such a relief. This is because the growth consultant helps you streamline operations and sales processes to aid productivity. This would make you focus on being a founder instead of micromanaging your team. With this, you would conserve energy and reduce burnout, and increase business revenue in no time.
Better Alignment Between Team, Execution, and Vision
Your business can’t scale past current revenue because of the misalignment between your team and your business vision. And if your team doesn’t understand the vision of your business, they cannot execute their tasks properly. However, a growth consultant helps to align your business strategy with the mode of operation. They do this by breaking down the vision into simpler bits that are easy to understand and operate with. Through this, they would create a better sync between your team and your business’s vision, aiding better productivity.
How to Choose The Right Growth Consultant
Choosing the right growth consultant for your business is very pivotal to overcoming a growth plateau. To scale past your current revenue, you need someone who understands that your business needs are unique to you. And not every business growth consultant understands this. However, here are a few things to know when choosing a growth consultant for your business.
Know What to Look For
- Strategic Thinking Over Tactics: A good growth consultant doesn’t roll with trial-and-error systems. Instead, they create a strategic growth plan that controls the tactics they use to grow and scale your business. They do this after properly assessing your business model and structure so that they don’t create a plan that won’t work.
- Ask for Relevant Case Studies: You deserve to know if a growth consultant has helped another business to increase revenue or get out of business stagnation. You should consider the results of other businesses they have worked with, especially businesses in a similar industry to yours.
- Check for Industry Fit and Understanding: Before you choose, ensure that the consultant understands what works in your business sector. When we say “understand what works,” we mean, they must know the key drivers in your sector.
Ask the Right Questions in Discovery Calls
The questions you ask would determine the kind of business growth consultant you would end up hiring for your business. This is your cue to ask the right questions. Here are 5 important questions you should ask before choosing a growth consultant for your business.
- “What is the consultancy’s track record?” The goal of this question is to evaluate their competence and to investigate their past performance.
- “How do you measure success?” This question ensures that their KPIs and metrics align with your growth goals.
- “What is the expected timeframe?” Time is such a big factor in business growth, and your business goals should be time-bound. This is what makes your goals realistic.
- “What is the cost and return on investment(ROI)?” You should consider your budget and potential ROI to ensure that it is within what you can work with. So ask to know what it would cost you and what it would help you gain.
- “What are the potential risks?” You deserve to know what you are likely to lose. This would help you evaluate your options properly.
Avoid Certain Red Flags
The biggest red flag to avoid is the cookie-cluster strategy. This is because some growth consultants just replicate the same model or offer regardless of business size. It would not grow your business. Your business needs a growth system that is tailor-made for it. Secondly, if they cannot show you the success they’ve produced for other businesses, it is a red flag. In general, even if your business has flatlined, you still should take your time in finding a good growth consultant.
Ready To Scale? Your Next Move
Do you need help scaling your business, or do you want to create a growth strategy for your small business plateau? Are you trying to cross a revenue ceiling, or do you need clarity on how to get out of business stagnation? You need a business consultant for scaling. Your next move should be the move that would change your business for the better. If this is you, then you should book a diagnostic call, audit, or strategy session with us now. We are a business growth consultant for small businesses, and your growth is our priority. To book a session, click on this link: https://biztraction.biz/appointments/; Let us identify your business needs and help you overcome a growth plateau.
