27 CHALLENGES

 

27 Key Challenges Currently Facing Growth Companies

Read through this list of challenges and circle your TOP FIVE as you experience them today.

 

  1.   Profits are inadequate to grow the company.
  2.   Need for an improved business/profit design
  3.   Customers are migrating away from your product/services
  4.   Continual cash flow challenges
  5.   Limited capital to grow
  6.   Employee turnover
  7.   Hiring quality staff
  8.   Staff morale and voltage challenges
  9.   Need for a flexible planning model
  10.   Need to have better staff buy-in
  11.   Project management & resource coordination challenges
  12.   Leadership/staff communication gap
  13.   New staff orientation
  14.   Staff training
  15.   Unclear values throughout the organization
  16.   Dealing with the cost of lost expertise or knowledge when employees leave
  17.   Chaotic periods destabilize the company
  18.   Organization needs to understand how the company will grow in the future
  19.   Organization needs to understand the impact that staff satisfaction has on the    company’s profitability
  20.   Company culture is generally resistant to change
  21.   The marketplace and your customers change too quickly
  22.   Difficulty forecasting problem areas before they surface
  23.   Difficulty diagnosing the real problems or obstacles to growth
  24.   Too slow getting new products/services to market
  25.   Not able to quickly get systems and procedures in place as the company is growing
  26.   Weak product/service development & differentiation in the market
  27.   Challenge expanding sales

 

The 7 Stages of Growth were developed by James Fischer, Founder of Origin Institute, a research and consulting company out of Boulder, CO. The Stages of Growth are based on a nine year study of entrepreneurial companies in the Front Range and Silicon Valley and interviews with over 700 CEOs to understand and decipher the patterns, the behavior and the characteristics of growth in entrepreneurial enterprises.