Four questions can help you figure out whether the most important obstacle to overcome right now is primarily related to what you truly want, what you believe, what you know, or your mental and emotional state.
If you are struggling to grow your business, I have four questions for you. Take a moment to be really, really honest with yourself, because knowing the answer to these four questions can help you create the focus you need to move your business into its next phase of growth:
Question 1: Do you REALLY want your business to grow?
When we associate pain to accomplishing a goal to which we also associate pleasure, it creates an inner conflict that drains our mental and emotional energy. Often our subconscious mind would block us from seeing the ideas that would help us achieve that goal, because it is trying to protect us from the pain associated with it.
Do you associate pain with the idea of growing your business? One of the most common myths I find amongst founders struggling to grow their businesses is that a bigger business means more work. They are already working harder than they should be, and they believe that growing the business would require even more work, and that having a larger business would mean more work forever.
Make sure you have no overt or covert pain linked to the idea of growing your business. As long as you do, it will trip you up every time.
Question 2: Do you believe that it is possible to grow your business?
When we believe that something is impossible, we don’t even try. You might really want to grow your business, but you simply believe that it is impossible. Maybe you think the economy is against you, or that you are in the wrong industry, or that you just don’t have the skills needed.
Whatever the reasons might be – get these out in the open, so that you can address them one by one. As long as you believe that it is impossible to grow your business, this belief will undermine your every effort.
Question 3: Do you know how to grow your business?
If you truly want to grow your business, and you have no doubt that it is possible, you a are already doing better than many entrepreneurs around you. However, the next question is, do you know how?
Lack of knowledge is an infinite landscape. The key to managing it is to become specific regarding what you don’t know. As long as you just feel that you don’t know how to grow your business, you will not be able to move forward. You have to become specific regarding what you know, and what you do not know.
The moment you are clear about what you don’t know, you will find it much easier to obtain that knowledge.
My go-to methodology when I am helping founders work through this, is Theory of Constraints. Your business is a collection of processes, but it is also one piece in a larger process. If your business is struggling to grow, then it can only be because:
1 – You are struggling to find the right resources.
2 – You are struggling to produce fast enough.
3 – You are struggling to sell what you are producing.
So your constraint is in supply, in production, or in demand.
Once you know where it is, you can focus on that part. If your constraint is in demand, then instead of your problem being, “I don’t know how to grow my business,” your problem has now become, “I don’t know how to create more demand for my products.”
Or, if it is in production, then your problem now has become, “I don’t know how to produce products faster.” If it is in your supply, then the problem is, “I don’t know how to obtain enough input resources fast enough.”
In each of these cases, you can now focus further. If the problem is in demand, what exactly is it that you do not know with regards to how to generate more demand? Do you not know how to create a sales funnel? Do you not know how to get more leads into the top of your funnel? Or do you maybe not know how to move leads through your funnel faster?
If you just keep drilling down layer after layer, you will gain more and more clarity, until you know exactly what it is that you need to know, in order to grow your business. Once you know what the most important piece of knowledge is that you are missing, formulate that into a few clear questions – And the chances are that once you have clarified your questions, you will either be able to figure out the answers, or know where you can go for those answers.
Question 4: Will you do it?
So let us say you have now overcome all three of these prior obstacles. You really want to grow your business. You absolutely believe it is possible. You have figured out exactly what it was that you didn’t know how to do, figured out how to do it, and now you have an action plan that you know will work … if you can just do it.
But then you wake up on a Monday morning, and you look at this action plan, and it requires some tough conversations. Or it requires you to motivate and inspire your team for a special push.
Or whatever it is that needs to be done – but you know YOU are going to have to take action on this – and maybe you just don’t have the emotional strength to take that action. Maybe you lack that character strength because you’ve never developed it, or maybe your mental and emotional energy levels are just depleted.
Whether it’s burnout, or just a weariness, or a character weakness – You can have the best plans in the world, the faith to move mountains, and a burning desire to grow your business – but if your heart doesn’t have the strength, you’re not going to get it done.
Often it’s a bit of all four
I have often found that there is a bit of a combination of these three that has been holding me back, and I have found the same in the lives of entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. However, by taking the time to think about each of these questions, invariably there is one that resonates most. The value of this is that it gives you a place to focus. A kind of “personal constraint” area that helps you move away from a general sense of struggling to grow, to a specific area in which you can begin to identify what the most important obstacle is that you should be overcoming right now.
Blessings to you
Ashton
Grow Your Business
5-2-50 is a community of Christian small business entrepreneurs eradicating poverty through creating good jobs and building wealth. We focus on business growth in both staff numbers, to create jobs, and net profit, to generate wealth for reinvestment, whilst freeing the founders from the day to day grind of their businesses, to build what God is calling them to next.
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