When growth feels hard, we start to believe it will always be hard.
We push harder. More marketing. More hours. More effort. But when there’s a hidden handbrake you can’t see, pushing harder just wears you out.
There are three growth hurdles that make growth feel perpetually hard. This short guide will help you to see growth problems for what they are – a series of individual, predictable, clearable hurdles.
The Three Growth Stages
Growth Stage | Core Problem | Typical Feeling |
Pre-Growth | Growth is blocked | “I’m working hard but not moving forward.” |
Growth Engine | Not enough leads or sales | “We are at the mercy of the market.” |
Post-Growth | The business can’t cope | “Growth is making things worse, not better.” |
Each hurdle needs a different fix. Applying the wrong fix to the wrong hurdle is the most common reason growth stalls.
Stage 1: The Business Isn’t Ready to Grow
The most common and most invisible hurdle is a business model that’s not ready for growth.
From the outside, the business looks fine. Work is getting done. Clients are being served. But inside, you’re the one holding it together. Your time and effort are covering the gaps.
And it works. Until you try to grow something bigger. Then you run out of hands.
The most common blockers:
- Owner capacity: No spare time or bandwidth to drive growth
- Profit margin: The model doesn’t make enough profit to scale with employees
- Owner dependency: The business can’t run without the owner
- Cash and time: Nothing left over to invest in growth
When you try to grow in this state, the reward is more work than you can handle, lower income than your staff (you get paid last), and general chaos. Growth feels painful and you couldn’t be blamed for wanting to return to a more manageable size.
No amount of great marketing can fix this.
Where to start: Make a list of “things I wish were better about the business” and change the name of this list to “things I need to change to grow”. Start with non-negotiables such as:
- I need time to work on growth
- I need enough profit margin to cover the costs of growth (employee wages, training, marketing)
Stage 2: The Growth Engine Is Missing
Once the business is in the right shape to grow, the next hurdle is building your growth engine.
What is a growth engine? It’s the difference between waiting for more customers, and ordering more customers as you need them. The ability to inject money at any time and receive 10x that amount in customers.
A growth engine has two parts: marketing and sales.
Marketing
Most businesses don’t have a real marketing engine. They have hope.
They hope the market picks up. They hope referrals come in. They hope this month is better than last. When leads are up, it’s a relief. When they’re down, it’s a worry.
In stark contrast, a real marketing engine gives you customers on demand. It includes at least one activity that reliably returns $10 for every $1 you put in.
Until then, your entire marketing effort is aimed at reaching this tipping point. Every email, ad, post, DM, and mailbox drop is aimed at finding this. After this tipping point, growth is limited only by how much you want to invest. You upgrade from a sailboat (waiting for the wind to change), to a motorboat (marketing spend now is fuel, not cost).
Signs this hurdle is in your way:
- Leads arrive without pattern or reason
- You rely on referrals you can’t control
- You have no say over the type of customer you attract
- You take on ill-fitting clients because you can’t afford to be fussy
- Growth, when it comes, catches you off guard and you can’t capitalise
Sales
As lead flow grows, gaps in the sales process become more and more expensive (i.e. worth fixing).
A 10% lift in conversion on $1M in sales is $100K in extra revenue. $100k of pure profit. This is why sales can be one of the highest-leverage and fastest-acting places to improve your business.
Money can leak from many places in a sales process:
- Proposals that don’t close
- Follow-up that doesn’t happen
- Offers that don’t convert
- Scripts that are weak or not consistent
- Pricing and packaging that result in low margins
- Monthly sales metrics that are not recorded or used to find the gaps
The key to seeing and managing these gaps is measuring your sales funnel. Here’s an example:
| Reach | Response | Conversation | PROPOSAL | Sale | Revenue | Repeat Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | 10 | 4 | 2 | 1 | $10,000 | $20,000 |
These numbers can tell you exactly where your funnel is healthy or unhealthy. Often a small fix to a script, email template, or proposal can bring an easy 10% boost in sales.
Example remedies for each funnel stage:
- Reach: Increase quantity of marketing
- Response: Improve Email scripts, DM scripts, Strengthen CTAs
- Conversations/Sales Calls: CTAs, Follow-up, Offer (more than a chat), Reminders
- Sales: Script, Offer, Packaging, Pricing, Followup, Proposals
- Revenue ($ per sale): Packaging, Upsells, Pricing
- Repeat Sales: Recurring Options, Followup, Add Products to Offer
Signs this hurdle is in your way:
- You know sales are low, but don’t know why
- Leads go cold with no follow-up
- Close rates vary depending on who’s selling
- No regular review and fixing of the funnel
Where to start:
- Focus on reaching your first tipping point in marketing – your first reliable high-ROI activity. This will give you permission (and excitement) to invest more into growth.
- Then measure and fix your sales leaks, one at a time.
- Once you have customers on tap, you can stop worrying about lack of customers and graduate to Stage 3 problems.
Stage 3: The Business Can’t Cope With Growth
Growth creates problems.
More clients means more staff. More staff means more moving parts. The systems that worked at a smaller size start to break.
It’s overwhelming, and the typical response is to slow down, pull back, and find a size that feels manageable. But in doing this you shrink to the level of the weakest part of your business, which is a crying shame because it’s well below its real potential.
Common problems at this stage:
- Staff not performing or not staying
- Efficiency breaking down as volume grows
- Profit leaks that only show up at scale
- Quality dropping across a larger team
- Leadership gaps that widen as the business grows
When these go unsolved, more leads create more chaos. The engine you’ve built goes to waste and you might even fear new customers and deliberately ignore new opportunities because of the pain they bring.
Mental shift you must make:
Through this phase we must stop seeing problems as a bad thing.
Not all problems are unwanted problems. When we grow, we get expected, welcome problems caused by growth. These new problems are proof of progress! And they are solvable if we meet them one by one. They only turn negative if they go unsolved for a long time.
Where to start:
Your job now to observe and clear the problems created by growth.
Your results will be eaten away by:
- Any other roles you’re holding onto that you should have handed off.
- Any lack of profit or time not fixed in Stage 1
Growth Isn’t Hard. It’s Been Snagged.
Healthy businesses grow.
When you’re not spending your time hiding the gaps in your business, when marketing has found its tipping point, when the major sales leaks are fixed, and you’ve settled into a growth-enabling role, growth stops being a grind and starts being inevitable.
The hurdles are real. But if you start jumping one hurdle at a time, it won’t take you long to feel like a hurdler.
If you need support: MG52 \\ Measured Growth 1-1 Coaching Program