Last month I listed five mistakes I’ve witnessed company owners and executives make that damaged their businesses. The following are a few more potentially serious mistakes that I’ve seen.
Without a doubt, your company should have at least one, if not several, depending upon your product or service offering, repeatable sales processes. However, if your sales process is too long, too complex, or inconvenient, you will increase the opportunities for a potential customer to leave your sales funnel. Little things such as pre-preparing necessary paperwork or expediting information flow to your prospect go a long way toward making it easier to make the sale.
This is not always a mistake. However, many experienced potential team members may bring bad habits or lack of cultural fit into your business. In many instances what they were doing in the past may be irrelevant to what they will be doing in your organization. Worse still is hiring a team member who is not a cultural fit with your company.
Often solutions to problems that seem complicated can be simplified after several cycles of solution refining. In most cases, a few solution design iterations with the goal of simplifying the solution will result in a more elegant, easier to implement solution. This is related to the next mistake I’ve observed during my career.
There are situations where a problem or process is seemly very complex. For example, developing a new product offering for your company. It can be daunting to face all the steps necessary to bring a new product or service to market:
Each of these questions and many more questions should be addressed separately, although sometimes in parallel. Some may be sub-divided to simplify the process further. Address complexity in digestible chunks.
While there is nothing wrong with fast growth especially when growth comes to your organization without “trying.” There are many potholes on the growth superhighway. Almost all businesses grow organically, without plans or forethought. Many grow to a point where their organic growth gets them to an aw-s**t moment. At that moment, they are faced with many difficult decisions, or in extreme cases failure. It is much better to step back from time to time and plan for your growth. Planning will result in healthy, steady and sustainable growth. Planning does not take nearly as long as fixing a damaged business.