Let us start this video by quoting Ayman Al-Abdullah, now business coach and former CEO of App Sumo – a business he grew from $3million to $80million in revenue:

Like many of us

Your company likely won’t die because of a crisis

Your company will die from a chronic problem you ignored for years

— Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱 (@aymanalabdul) July 10, 2023

He continues:

Focus on fixing recurring problems over one-time issues

Leaders tend to focus on the one-off problems because they’re easier to solve

But the recurring problems are the real bottleneck in your business

— Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱 (@aymanalabdul) July 10, 2023

Why do we begin with this quote? Because Ayman’s wisdom is aligned with the advice of this video.

Tackle root causes.

Stalled growth tends to happen as businesses grow because, amongst other reasons:

1. Founding teams, whether consciously or unconsciously, are initially agile and aligned, working towards the same goal. But as the team size grows, things change. Misalignment arises. This could happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the market presents many different opportunities to grow, but without alignment amongst the entire team, especially the leaders, the business tries to grow in multiple directions, spreading itself too thin and/or confusing customers and employees alike.
2. Further, the business may have started with a new or relatively new product, or in an expanding market, where demand outstripped supply. But over time more competitors have entered the market, saturating it, making it more difficult for customers to see opposing offerings as anything different except for price.

One of the first responses to this may commonly be: “We need more leads”. So, you turn to marketing. But without clarity, marketing endeavours fall well short of required expectations.

The subsequent response may then be XYZ marketing isn’t working, let’s change marketing agency. But little changes.

Over time frustration builds as profits margins are being squeezed. Next on the firing line is staff productivity. Whether the sales team or operations. Whilst it may be very true that issues exist here, this is not likely addressing the root cause and may be leading you down a road of moderate growth or perhaps eventual closure.

Whether you come to the realisation now or in ten years, it’s the root cause you need to address. And in many cases that root cause is:

Inadequate Clarity.

If you as the business owner / CEO / MD / Department Head can’t precisely tell us:

• why your business exists;
• who exactly are your ideal customers;
• what painful problems you solve for them; and
• what core strategies will lead to success,

how can you possibly expect your employees – your marketing and sales teams, and operations – to execute effectively and thereby create the growth you desire and need?

Clarity of purpose – vision and mission – enables clarity of strategy. Clarity of strategy enables focus on brand distinctiveness and value proposition for customers. Combined, these are the building blocks enabling improved and viable growth.

The easy part is figuring this out. In knowing this is the starting point. The hard part is finding clarity.

If you’d like our help with this, we’d be thrilled to offer it. Helping business leaders bring clarity into the light and drive long-term success is what we’re all about.

Please feel welcome to book a Get To Know Each Other meeting and we can begin to explore what exactly we can do for you.

Building talent from within your business is absolutely vital for success.

It’s tremendously difficult to find talented people from the outside and convince them to come onboard through recruitment. When you find them, they’re often expensive.

High performing businesses work out a way to both attract talent and cultivate it from within.

Having a clear purpose helps with both attraction and retention. A high trust and high standards culture does likewise, and it also motivates staff to perform to their best. Then having learning programmes, which effectively build the internal capabilities of your team, turns it all into a sustainable competitive advantage.

We don’t just say these things because we believe them to be true. We say them because it’s what science has shown us to be true.

There’s the research we mention on the Experience Success page, which found “Winner” businesses that built talent from within on average outperformed those that didn’t with 5x more Sales, 14x more Profit and 15x more Total Return to Owners over 10 years.

There’s also other research, such as one which examined the benefits of teaching employees corporate entrepreneurship and found it produced such benefits as:

• Promoting innovation and creativity;
• Higher returns on sales and more market share;
• Higher rates of customer retention; and
• Higher productivity and efficiency.

To quote that research and associated briefing:

“In the knowledge based economy, a company will succeed or fail because of the people it has. …., this is also not just bringing in the right people but in training them to be the kind of people the company needs to be competitive. The paper found, “human capital can be seen as a unique source of sustainable competitive advantage since efforts toward sustainability largely depend on the effective utilisation of human resources, leading to returns on sales, market shares, customer retention, efficiency and productivity.””

So, we’re presuming if you’re watching this you’re likely a business leader. If you’ve got this far, you get it. You know for your business to reach its potential and experience success you’ve got to address the Purpose, Culture and Talent problems we’ve mentioned on the Sustainable Competitive Advantage page.

We encourage you now to do one or all of the following:

1. Complete the spam-free diagnostic below.
2. Sign up to the free tier of the Munro’s Business Academy.
3. Book a Get To Know Each Other meeting.

We’re absolutely serious that we offer a give us a go Risk-Free trial. Give us 90 days to work together and we’ll get you achieving more than you ever have before.

Hopefully, we’ll be seeing you soon.

In that video you just watched, we mentioned some research.

If you’d like the references, simply head on in to the Munro’s Business Academy and you can find them on the Reference page.