Why Your Business Growth Strategy Is Probably Too Complicated
Business is complicated enough without us making it worse. Growth does not come with guarantees, and when results take longer than expected, the temptation is always to add more. More ideas. More channels. More tools. More activity. That is often where the real problem starts.
Starting a business is hard.
In my case, it is probably the hardest thing I have ever done.
There are no guarantees in anything you do, and that is especially true when you start talking about business growth strategy.
You can research.
You can plan.
You can build.
You can make what you believe are all the right decisions.
And it still might take months or years before you really know whether you are going to get where you want to go.
That uncertainty is where people often begin to make things worse.
When something is not moving quickly enough, the natural human response is to do more.
But more does not automatically mean better.
Why Do Business Growth Strategies Become So Complicated?
As humans, we tend to believe that if something is not working, we need to do more. That instinct becomes particularly dangerous when you are building a business and results are still slow.
More marketing.
More content.
More outreach.
More tools.
More platforms.
More offers.
More activity.
Then you have an endless stream of people online telling you to push harder, work harder and do more.
If you have been working for months and the results are still not there, panic can start to creep in.
That is when you start adding things.
And that is often when the strategy becomes complicated.
Are you doing too little, or have you simply not given the right things enough time?
I also think we need to be careful about the phrase being busy.
Being busy is not a bad thing.
If you are busy because you have clients, work coming in and revenue being generated, that is a very good position to be in.
The problem is different when you first start.
At the beginning you can be incredibly busy without having much to show for it financially.
You are building the website.
Creating the offer.
Working on positioning.
Producing content.
Learning how the market reacts.
Speaking to prospects.
Adjusting things constantly.
There is a huge amount to do, but very little certainty.
Results Are Slow
Organic business growth often takes far longer than people expect, particularly when a brand is starting from nothing.
We Add More
When progress feels slow, the instinct is often to add another tactic rather than question whether the original activity simply needs more time.
Everybody Has Advice
Online advice can easily create the impression that every successful business must be everywhere, doing everything, all of the time.
The Strategy Expands
Eventually there are so many moving parts that it becomes difficult to know what is working, what is not and what actually matters.
When growth is slow, adding more activity can feel like progress. Sometimes the smarter decision is to keep doing the right things long enough for them to work.
Do You Actually Know Where Your Business Is Going?
Before you worry about tactics, channels or tools, you need to know what you are trying to build. If there is no destination, there is no meaningful way to decide whether the strategy is taking you towards it.
I am not going to give somebody a generic business growth strategy and pretend it will work for everyone.
That would be bullshit.
Every business is different.
Every niche is different.
Every market behaves differently.
What works in my business might be completely wrong for somebody else’s.
What I can say is that whatever strategy you choose, you need to know where you are trying to go.
A lot of people start with an idea, product or service without really thinking through what they ultimately want from it.
Do you want a small profitable business?
A larger company?
Recurring revenue?
A business you can eventually sell?
Something you can operate around your life?
Those are very different destinations.
And if you do not know the destination, it becomes very easy to drift.
You will come off the road occasionally. The important thing is having a road to come back to.
When you start a business, I think you should be looking at a minimum six-month horizon.
Your offer needs to align with your audience.
Your audience needs to align with your messaging.
Your messaging needs to align with the website.
Your website needs to align with the content.
Your content needs to align with the sales activity.
And all of it needs to be pointing towards the same end goal.
Know The Goal
Decide what you ultimately want the business to become before you begin building all of the activity around it.
Build The Road
Align the offer, audience, positioning, website, content and sales activity around one clear direction.
Adjust
Learn from the market and make small changes without throwing away the direction you have already spent months building.
Return To The Road
Opportunities and experiments may take you away temporarily, but the original direction gives you something to return to.
A strategy does not need to predict everything that will happen. It needs to give the business a clear enough direction that every new idea does not become a new direction.
What Happens When You Keep Changing Direction?
Strategy should change. Businesses learn, markets change and better ideas appear. But there is a very big difference between improving a strategy and repeatedly repositioning the entire business.
This is where I think many businesses lose huge amounts of time.
You can reposition.
Of course you can.
Sometimes you absolutely should.
But you need to understand what a major repositioning actually means.
Particularly when you are trying to grow organically.
Imagine you spend three months telling search engines, prospects and the market that your business does one thing.
You build pages around it.
You publish content around it.
You create signals around it.
You begin building relevance and authority.
Then three months later you decide you want to be something substantially different.
You have not simply changed a sentence on a website.
You have changed the direction of the business digitally.
Depending on how significant that repositioning is, you can easily put yourself back another three, four, five or six months.
Small And Frequent Adjustments
Refine the message, improve the offer, adjust the process, strengthen the content and learn from what the market is telling you without abandoning the underlying direction.
Major Repositioning Every Few Months
Repeatedly changing the audience, offer, positioning and direction can reset months of work and prevent the business from ever building meaningful momentum.
That does not mean your original strategy needs to stay frozen.
It should not.
You learn as you go.
Customers teach you things.
Prospects teach you things.
Search data teaches you things.
Your own experience teaches you things.
So the strategy will evolve.
My argument is simply that the changes should usually be small.
You might make fifty small amendments before you get where you want to be.
You might make one hundred.
Nobody knows at the beginning.
Improve the strategy as often as necessary. Just be very careful about changing the destination every time progress feels slower than you expected.
Is Business Growth Really A Strategy Problem — Or A Time Problem?
Organic business growth takes ages. That is probably one of the least attractive things anybody can tell a new business owner, but pretending otherwise does not make it less true.
Starting a business and building genuine growth within it takes time.
Sometimes a very long time.
Months.
Years.
And there is no point during that journey where somebody can guarantee that you will eventually get there.
That is incredibly difficult psychologically.
You can put enormous amounts of effort into something without knowing whether it is eventually going to give you the return you are hoping for.
That is one of the reasons so many people give up.
They do not necessarily give up because the original idea was wrong.
They give up because the gap between starting and succeeding lasts far longer than they expected.
Build
You begin creating the foundations, positioning, messaging, website, offer and initial route to market.
Learn
You begin gathering signals, testing assumptions, understanding how people respond and making small improvements.
Wait
Organic authority, trust, recognition and demand do not operate to the timetable a new business owner would ideally choose.
Compound
The value comes when months of consistent activity begin working together rather than being repeatedly replaced by a new strategy.
I think this is also why people are so vulnerable to the idea that they need another strategy.
Six months feels like a long time when you are spending money and not making much.
Twelve months feels even longer.
Then somebody appears online telling you the answer is a completely different funnel, platform, offer or marketing method.
It is tempting.
But changing everything can mean starting the clock again.
Sometimes the strategy is not failing. Sometimes the business is simply still being built.
This is why I think the real skill is not creating the most sophisticated growth strategy.
It is knowing what should stay fixed and what should be allowed to evolve.
The end goal should be relatively stable.
The main direction should be relatively stable.
The strategy underneath it can change.
And it will change.
But those changes should normally be tweaks, improvements and refinements rather than huge movements from one direction to another.
You may need fifty adjustments before the business works. You may need one hundred. The point is to keep improving without repeatedly throwing away the progress you have already made.
Your Growth Strategy Probably Does Not Need More. It Needs Direction.
Business growth is difficult enough.
You do not need to make it harder by continuously rebuilding the strategy.
Know what you want.
Decide where you are trying to go.
Build the business around that direction.
Make sure the offer, audience, positioning, website, content and sales activity are aligned.
Then give them time.
Learn.
Improve.
Tweak.
Adjust.
But do not assume that every slow period means the entire direction is wrong.
A good business growth strategy is not one that never changes. It is one that can evolve without losing sight of where the business is actually trying to go.
Organic growth takes time.
There is no way around that.
You may spend months building before the market begins to notice you.
You may spend years before the business becomes what you originally imagined.
And the final business may not look exactly like the one you first planned.
That is fine.
Businesses evolve.
Strategies evolve.
People evolve.
What matters is that the changes move you further along the same road rather than constantly putting you back at the beginning.