5 Barriers to Small Business Growth & How to Break Them

Author: Minnie

Dec. 30, 2024

5 Barriers to Small Business Growth & How to Break Them

Despite the pandemic and recession concerns, small business optimism remains steady. According to Capital One&#;s latest Small Business Growth Index, 64 percent of businesses view conditions as &#;good or excellent.&#;

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Optimism aside, many businesses find their growth plans thwarted at every turn. Surprisingly, one of the biggest impediments to growth is the business itself. Many businesses simply aren&#;t operationally ready for growth because a lack of skilled labor, poor hiring decisions, a lack of competitive intelligence, and so on.

How can you make your small business grow faster? What impacts the growth of small businesses? How do you finance growth?

Here&#;s a round-up of some of the most common barriers to growth and steps you can take to break through them as you look to capitalize on key small business trends for :

1. Ignoring Business Indicators

Everyone wants revenue growth, but what form will it take and are you ready to grow in that area? Study your business indicators regularly to monitor growth opportunities. This includes your sales pipeline, conversion rates, and market trends.

Things to look out for include success in one market or location and the potential to expand into another. Is a big sales deal on the horizon? Is your pipeline trending favorably? Is success in one area of product development opening new doors of opportunity for others?

2. Overlooking the Competition

Competition can be a great driver for growth if you approach it correctly. There&#;s no point making it your mission to be better than the competition if you don&#;t have a deep knowledge of where you stand against them. A powerful tool for doing this is a simple SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for &#;Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.&#; A SWOT analysis can help you identify what&#;s working and what isn&#;t, and where to concentrate your energies.

3. Forgetting About People Until It&#;s Too Late

Despite record high unemployment rates, a lack of skills and abilities remains a major concern. Today, 40 percent of organizations report that they have been negatively impacted by talent scarcity.

To grow you need to surround yourself with great people. Always be on the lookout for talent. Build a stable of independent contractors who can get to know your business well and contribute on an as-needed basis. Once you&#;re ready to grow they can step in with minimal ramp-up and help you meet your goals.

Another option comes in the form of mentors. Having someone beside you who&#;s been there before as you enter new territory can be invaluable.

4. Not Accounting for Risk Early in the Growth Phase

Small business growth doesn&#;t come without risk. As you plan your growth strategy, have a &#;Plan B&#; in place that accounts for any hurdles along the way that might impede growth. Things like hiring problems, manufacturing issues, unexpected expenses, cash flow challenges, patent infringements, and so on.

Go back to your SWOT analysis and identify these risks or threats and think about ways you can fix or get around them. These are also good conversations to have with your mentor as well as your accountant and/or lawyer.

5. Failing to Plan for Cash Flow Issues

With growth comes extra cost. If your outgoings are more than your income, even for a short period, paying your bills gets difficult. In fact, cash flow issues are one of the most common reasons why small businesses fail&#; 90 percent close their doors for this reason.

To preserve cash flow while growing your business, you may need access to funding. But take time to consider which loan types make sense for you because not all are created equal.

For example, if you&#;re looking to fund expansion or need an injection of cash during unpredictable operating cycles you may want to explore a business line of credit. You can get set up a line of credit before you need it and only pay for the funds you use. Lines of credit are revolving, and monthly payments don&#;t kick in until you dip into the cash.

Another option is a term loan. This gives you access to a set amount of money with a specific repayment schedule. Term loans often have low interest rates and provides the funding for small business growth initiatives such as opening a new location, upgrading equipment, purchasing vehicles, or remodeling your space. With a term loan funding your growth you can preserve your cash flow for other areas of your business such as payroll.

To make planning work for your business, you should revisit it as you grow. In that way, it&#;s less about the plan and more about planning. For tips on doing this consider reading: How to Create a Business Plan for Any Stage of Your Company. Lastly, if you&#;re interested in providing direct working capital solutions to your customers, learn how to become a Fundbox partner to utilize our platform for embedded finance.

5 Top Reasons Why You Face Obstacles In Business ...

None of us are just sitting around doing nothing. We&#;re always striving to perfect ourselves and our respective businesses. Don&#;t worry; every journey has its fair share of thorns and obstacles that we need to overcome to prosper.

Small businesses have a terrible habit of struggling with their development, and that is mostly due to stagnation or proper modernization. A lack of adequate financing doesn&#;t always stunt growth, and there could be a lot of different factors that contribute to the growth-stunt.

Business statistics are an often-overlooked factor that either makes or breaks a business. Did you know that only 50% of small businesses survive for five years or longer? With the business market consisting of a whopping 99.7% of small companies, it&#;s integral to ensure you don&#;t wind up like 50% of your competition.

No one wants to struggle with their business, and that is why we need to right all of the wrongs we face.

But you&#;re not alone. Every person in business faces his fair share of obstacles, and more often than not, they fall within the same category.

While your problems might be unique, it&#;s most likely related to one of the main factors on which your business is based on.

There are a couple of patterns that we&#;ve recognized that seem to go wrong for most people. Here are the top 5 problems that business development faces on the regular and their respective solutions.

Problem 1: Stunted Growth

This is a no brainer. Your business is no longer developing because it has stunted growth. It is essential to find out what exactly is stopping you from advancing. Once you get to the bottom of your problem, you&#;re bound to find the solution.

There can be a wide array of factors that influence your business daily. You need to know what your business is to improve it. Ask yourself the following questions.

  • Am I running my business correctly?
  • Am I encouraging my employees?
  • Am I doing everything in my power to perfect my workflow?
  • Is anything influencing this stunt?
  • Have I optimized my business strategy to its fullest potential?

Solution:

The solution lies within the questions you&#;ve asked yourself. If you have found that any of these questions have the wrong answer, you need to work on your specific problem to overcome it.

Generally, improving one of these issues is bound to enhance your business development, and improving all of them will make your business skyrocket to new heights.

Problem 2: Lack of Presence

A widespread problem that might be stunting your business development is facing your most prominent opponent, which in this case, is your corporate presence.

It&#;s tough to keep up with the times, as the times are changing at a never before seen pace. You need to establish your presence on every single medium to ensure that you&#;re going to appeal to a broader audience.

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Your business can&#;t grow if it does not have any clients, customers, or consumers to interact with it. And there is no way that people can interact or realize that your business is even there if they have no means of finding out about it.

People who have been business owners for quite some time face the hardest issues of modernizing their businesses. Business needs to keep up with the times to appeal to customers, as new generations are up and coming in the consumer worlds.

It&#;s a harsh reality, but not optimizing your online presence is going to be detrimental to your business practices. Trial and error are crucial when it comes to this.

Solution:

You need to get both yourself and your business out there in any way, shape, or form you can.

This includes establishing yourself on free mediums of marketing such as social media or paid marketing mediums such as search engine advertisement options.

Some of the social media that are popular for brand presence are:

  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

While there are many, many more social media platforms that you can get on virtually free of charge, establishing your corporation on one of them might take some more effort, time, and money than you expect.

It&#;s always better to have a limited corporate presence on the internet and social media, which is high in consistency and quality of its content than millions of shoddy accounts all around the place.

There are different guides on the internet that are bound to help you establish your corporate presence on today&#;s business chessboard. We suggest you products and content interact with the customer instead.

Solution:

There are numerous ways you can increase interactivity with your website, content, or service. One such method is through the utilization of quizzes into your business toolbox.

If you want to create an online quiz, it&#;s not going to be as simple as clicking a few buttons and leaving it be. Before you create anything, you need the proper quiz builder to do so.

One of the best quiz builders on the market is Lead Quizzes and Jotform Quiz Maker. Lead Quizzes allows you to create any form of a quiz you wish, which is bound to, in turn, improve your ROI, sales, leads, and, most of all, interactivity. You don&#;t need to interact with anyone if your content is doing it for you.

Problem 4: Lack of Feedback

There is no way you can work to develop your business to new heights if you don&#;t know what needs to be fixed, invented, or perfected within your existing business infrastructure.

Corporate feedback is probably the backbone of any successful business, and inspiring your consumers to leave detailed feedback can be tricky. Cafes might offer a free coffee if you leave a review on TripAdvisor, and e-commerce websites might offer a coupon, but what if you have nothing to provide for the much-needed customer feedback?

It&#;s essential to know how to approach your potential consumers, clients, and customers. Understanding your demographic is another vital aspect of the business, and the best way to understand what needs to be done is through customer feedback.

No feedback &#; no progression.

Solution:

One fantastic way to gather data from your customers and users is through the utilization of quizzes.

Quizzes have been mentioned above as an integral part of boosting your interactivity, but did you know they&#;re also probably the best way to collect data and feedback from your customers?

Everyone loves answering questions, especially if they are the subject of discussion. Or in your case, they can talk about their experience with your service. You can utilize a quiz to its fullest potential based on the questions you ask of your consumers, and the way you present them.

This is the superiority of quizzes above other methods of collecting feedback which can be dodgy and frightening at times. The subtle and laid back nature of quizzes gives them a deeper level of reliability and an easy-going persona.

You should not be fooled, though, as the information you&#;re going to gather and later analyze from these quizzes is going to be essential in your further business development. Lead Quizzes combines the creation tools needed to produce a quiz and the analytical tools to read the feedback data in one nifty package.

Problem 5: Risk-Taking

This is a tricky subject, as it can both be a solution and a problem. It&#;s critical to know which risks are valuable to take, and which will lead your corporate operation to stagnation.

Taking risks is essential to prosper and make your business boom. Partnerships are not that easy to come by, and some very lucrative ones can be missed out on if you&#;re not taking the risk that comes along with it.

While we don&#;t advise you to take every single risk, you definitely should give certain risks a little bit more thought.

Solution:

You need to know which risks are worth taking, and how you should take them. You need to take your risks carefully in order to ensure prosperity. You also need to know which risks you should never take.

Consistency is a thing you should never attempt to risk, as nothing can lead to a downfall of a business quite as quick as risking your consistency. Being not consistent enough is as detrimental to a business as being overly present.

In order to take risks like a professional, you need to assess them properly. There are quite a lot of different business risk assessment techniques, which you can find right here.

Conclusion

Small businesses and even large ones can face a myriad of different progression and development issues in their lifecycle, and that&#;s not a bad thing.

Facing an issue in your development is going to prompt you to research possible solutions to your problem and ensure you work to avoid them in the future.

It&#;s how you resolve these issues that matter. Remember, when it comes down to business, there aren&#;t any problems &#; just situations awaiting a proper resolution.

About the Author!

Angela White is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing for the consumer market in the areas of product research and marketing using quizzes and surveys. Having a knack for writing and an editorial mindset, She is an expert researcher at a brand that&#;s known for creating delightfully smart tools such as ProProfs Quiz Maker.

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