Alicja Radwanska (MD of Your Marketing Team)
Over 20 years of my career across different businesses internationally, from Blue Chip corporations, local leaders through to medium and small enterprises, I have noticed three common areas that are the most prevalent sources of business issues that hinder growth, no matter the company size or industry specifics.
Some of them might be more often seen in smaller enterprises where resources are lean and there is lack of expertise in certain areas of the business and others like implementation excellence, might be a problem regardless of the size of the business. These challenges start often at the leadership level and filter through to organisations and create serious stumbling blocks that prevent the business from growing:
Incomplete Business Foundation – lack or poorly defined brand purpose, values, vision and strategy
How can you get anywhere if you don’t know where you are going? Why are you doing what you are doing? Why does your business exist? What is your key purpose for getting up in the morning? Why do you want your business to transcend? Why have you chosen this career path?
You might have a good product offering, you know there is a market for it but, what is your exact destination and how are you planning to get there? What mode of transport you are going to use and how much will it cost you?
These are some critical questions an entrepreneur needs to have a clear answer to in order to develop a winning plan to reach the objectives they set out for their business. Evaluating your resources, setting the foundation for organisational culture by installing the correct values and defining what type of people you want in your team is crucial. Many founders think about those pieces of the puzzle often in the later stages of business development, sometimes when it is a little too late and certain decisions are difficult to reverse. It is the same as building a house, the foundation needs to be solid, you can’t fix it once the cement has been laid.
Lack of landscape understanding – missing market insight informing the business and marketing strategy
This is another very common issue and when I have asked several entrepreneurs and founders – Do you know your customer? How well do you know your industry? How well do you know your competition? Everyone without hesitation always provides a very affirmative “yes”. Really? How well do you know them? Do you know what really bothers them, what gives them headaches, what gives them sleepless nights, what makes them happy and what motivates and drives them?
What is your competition planning, what they are launching, who are they hiring, do you know what is changing in your industry? What new trends are evolving, what are your competitors doing, how is pricing fluctuating and what new technologies are being launched into the market? Only if you stay abreast with your competitors and industry landscape – can you truly react, mitigate the changes and stay ahead of your competition.
Poor Strategy Execution
And last but not least, something I have seen both in big corporates as well as smaller and agile enterprises. You can have the best vision for your business, most innovative and unique product offering and sound plan but, if you don’t have the right resources for implementation or great action plan and it’s simply not deployed with excellence and impact – all your efforts can fail.
Therefore, enterprises need to make sure they spend enough quality time and expertise on all 3 aspects that contribute towards the pillars of a businesses success, sustainable growth and hopeful profitability.
