Why did my business stop growing?
Growth usually stalls because something changed and nobody caught it. The market, the team, the offer, the price, or the way you sell. Start by deciding how you're measuring "stalled." Then go back to a time when it was working and compare it to today. What's different between then and now is where the answer is.
How do I know growth has actually stalled?
Pick the number that tells you. Revenue, new customers, average job size, close rate, active members. Then ask what drives that number, and what drives that, and keep going.
Some people call that regression analysis. I just keep asking why. Five or so rounds of it usually gets you to the cause.
What usually changed?
Compare a good year to now. Is the team different? Did your best salesperson leave? Did a new competitor show up, or did customers start shopping on price? Did you raise prices, or not raise them for years? Are leads coming from somewhere new?
Once owners actually look, they can usually name somewhere between three and ten things. Each one is a thread to pull.
Is it a lead problem or a sales problem?
Walk the whole path and find where it breaks. Is it demand, meaning not enough of the right people know you exist? Lead generation, meaning they know but don't reach out? Conversion, meaning they reach out but don't buy? Or closing, meaning deals stall at the end?
Each one has a different fix. Spending more on ads only helps the first two.
Can a business outgrow the way it sells?
Yes, and it's easy to miss because it's still working, just slower. At the field software company I ran, we sold one contractor at a time. To keep growing that way, we'd have needed something like fifty account executives instead of two or three.
So we changed how we sold. We built partnerships with trade associations and earned stage time at their conferences, and over time a big share of the people in those rooms were already customers. Here's that story.
When should I bring in outside help?
When you've looked and still can't see it, or when you can see it and nobody has time to fix it. Somebody from outside isn't attached to the assumptions everybody inside has stopped questioning.
I go in with a thesis and follow the data. Sometimes the answer is a plan, and sometimes it's building the fix. Here's how I work.
Talk it through with me.
Bring the problem, even if it's still fuzzy. We'll talk about what's going on, what might be behind it, and whether I'm the right person to help. If I'm not, I'll tell you.