Business Growth Obstacles and Challenges | Why Businesses are not Growing

In this article on business growth obstacle and challenges, I will discuss why struggling businesses are not growing and probably will not grow. This article is a continuation of my previous post on how to successfully run a small business and small business lessons from royal families.

10 Business Growth Obstacles and Challenges

1. Mediocre management team: Management team of a company is subtle difference that makes all the differences. Having a management that lacks basic knowledge of management functions is more dangerous than not having a management team at all.

You may ask, how can a company survive without having a management team? Well, same way a company cannot grow without having result oriented and data driven management team.

Mediocre management team lacks vision and foresight needed to harness a business potential for growth. Mediocre management team usually don’t see beyond their nose and this is a major business growth obstacle. A good manager thinks outside the box; they anticipate change but lead with focus.

• Inhibiting systems: The most brilliant idea will surely be handicapped by an inhibiting system. An inhibiting system is littered with unrelated silos of systems that can never work coherently for the good of an organization. The accounting information system cannot produce the desired result if it does not work in sync with other aspects of a business for example. For a system to be beneficial to an entity, the business requirement phase of building the individual systems must be handled by a mix of process owners and management staff.

• Unsuitable philosophy: Different businesses are better suited with certain philosophy than others. What works for business A will probably not work for business B. Care must be taken to ensure that the right sets of philosophies are adopted for sustainable growth.

• Unmotivated staff: Unmotivated staff will always in most cases work against the progress of a business. An organization must ensure that its workplace is safe and free from work place violence.

There are many ways to motivate your staff members, it is the duty of the decision makers to discover how to motivate its staff. What motivates accountants is different from what motivates other staff members of a company.

• Inadequate marketing efforts: Marketing is the fluid that takes a company’s products and services to places that it will ordinarily not have got to. Inadequate marketing is a huge contributor to business growth obstacle and challenge that must be faced squarely.

Marketing does not have to be the sole responsibility of the marketing department. It has to be a joint effort if the business is to make any headway as it concerns business growth. Part of the functions of accounting and finance department should include marketing.

• Application of wrong business model: To many businesses are still where they are today simply because they refuse to fine-tune their business model to suit the current reality of today’s world. Most so called entrepreneurs don’t even understand what a business model is.

Applying a wrong business model to a business is like putting square peg in a round hole. It may eventually go in but not without some serious work. Why go through that extra step of reshaping the hole rather than getting the right tool the first time?

Application of wrong business model also is a sign of overtrading which is a major reason why small businesses fail in their quest to grow.

• Inability to embrace change: One major characteristics of a business that is destined to fail is that they rather prefer to die with the primitive ways of doing things than embrace change. A business that does not change is like a stagnant water that will only continue to deteriorate with time.

Show me any successful business and I will show you a team of change management enthusiast working day and night to ensure that the growth of the business they represent continues to grow.

• Disregard for internal control: It is a shame that many businesses are still found wanting in the area of internal control despite how important internal control is to the success of organizations.

How can a business grow when it can barely safeguard its assets? Some small businesses don’t even keep accurate record of what was spent in a period let alone having a functional asset register. Not having an effective internal control is a business obstacle that must be removed if a business is to grow to its potential.

• Poor customer service: Customers are the reason why businesses are sets up in the first place and still remain the reason why businesses remain afloat in the long run. There will be nothing like business growth when there is no customer care, no matter how novel the products and services of a company might be.

• Poor supply chain and logistics system: What poor supply chain management does to the growth prospect of a business is to sit on its growth.