Overcoming A Business Plateau

Today, Office Power’s CEO and founder Simon Drakeford is here to talk about overcoming a business growth plateau.

Let’s begin with the life cycle of a business.

You have a brilliant concept, so you set up a company. It takes off and goes from strength to strength, growing and developing. And then growth seems to stall and your graphs plateau: you have hit a glass ceiling that just won’t shatter. So how do you break it to encourage a growth spurt?

The answer is change.

Something is preventing your business from growing, so you need to establish what it is and then change it. It can be a daunting prospect, but necessary if you want your business to continue growing. You need to start considering new marketing strategies, new investment or a new system. Whatever it is, it’s likely that something will be needed in order to deliver that next inflection point.

The business world is susceptible to external and environmental forces, which often influence changes in an industry and the structure of business. From economic change where optimising supply and demand is crucial, to price change whereby increasing visibility and competition can lead to price arbitration and the race to the bottom. There are always evolving supply chain dynamics, unstable FX or changing cost of raw materials. Finally, there is social change, which alters the way we buy products and interact with organisations.

Whatever the type of disruption, in most cases, commerce mirrors nature. Enter Darwin. Your business must react to these changes and adapt in order tosurvive and ultimately grow.

So what can you do as a business to avoid the plateau? You have two options.

• Firstly you can pivot, change your business model and do something different. Multinational conglomerate 3M took this approach when their mining business didn’t take off. But this is quite a big change, and one that you might not be willing to take.
• Alternatively, you could change the way you do business. Expand your company and venture into a new system like the online world.

Whatever you chose to do, one thing is for sure, at the pace of change in modern business and society, doing nothing is not an option.