As co-founder of Measurable Solutions, I have been delivering our introductory marketing course for a few years now. During this time we’ve had several hundred business owners come through our facility: some are large and some are small. What is interesting is that I notice there are certain characteristics that all of them have in common to some degree, and I’d like to make them known to you in case perhaps you haven’t recognized any of them in yourself or in your own business.

Commonly, a business owner has many things that take his or her attention away from the actual expansion of the organization. The first thing to recognize is that the attention is taken away from the expansion of the organization – until that is realized none of the other barriers will be in view. It’s not necessarily that business owners want a large facility or multiple facilities, or their name in lights or a shrine built to them, it’s just what we commonly find is what most people want is the ability to run their business from a distance. And many people are in business for two years or twenty years, and they have not been able to achieve that goal. There are some of you that have, and that’s fantastic.

We find that in the area of expanding a business stably there are a lot of reasons why this problem has never been addressed. These are what I call the lies that keep you from expanding your business.

One common lie that I find quite interesting is the number of business owners who come into our company and state that they do practically nothing to expand their business as if they are proud of it, in some bizarre way. I certainly expect that all of us should be doing good work, and if you aren’t at least achieving that end goal of delivering an exchangeable product to your customers, you should just quit and do something else. But assuming that everybody is delivering an exchangeable product and their business standards are high, I’m always shocked to hear that a large number of owners do nothing at all to expand their business. I usually hear things like, "Our customers know who we are and they keep coming back — word of mouth has gotten us this far so I see no reason to change and we have been marketing our business this way for years." What’s usually underneath all that is they don’t know what to do to market promote and expand their business so they do nothing and hope that their products and customer service will somehow keep the numbers going up.

Another lie that we hear very often as a reason for not expanding the business is being overwhelmed. Now, it is an interesting thing that whenever you propose a solution to anyone who is overwhelmed already with things to do or problems in life, they won’t implement it. I mean you could be leading them straight to the fountain of youth, but they would deny it and go in an opposite direction. I find commonly that overwhelm is nothing more than an inability to recognize the important things from the unimportant things. This is easily resolved but not until overwhelm at the top is handled. Once the owner can take a moment to really look at what is going on in the business he can see what is important and what is not important. Obviously this is a very important point to address and handle.

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