MBA2676 How to Break Through Business Plateaus and Reignite Growth

0:00Do you think your growth has stalled because the algorithm hates you? Here's the uncomfortable truth. Most growth stalls are self-inflicted. That's what I've learned in over two decades of doing business. In fact, a landmark Harvard Business Review analysis found that 87 % of big companies experience a major growth stall, and if they couldn't fix it fast, they rarely recover. Even tougher, the research shows that around 85 % of the barriers to profit growth are internal, not external. In today's lesson, you're going to learn how to break through business plateaus and reignite your growth. I'm going to give you a playbook to diagnose your plateau, run the exact experiments that reignite momentum, and rebuild your pipeline without burning out or burning cash.

0:48Sounds good? Let's get into it.

0:56Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Real quick, if these episodes help you in any way, hit the follow button on this podcast app. It helps us to keep bringing you practical business insights three times a week for free. Thanks. First things first, why do plateaus even happen in the first place? And why it's actually good news. Plateaus sometimes feel personal, but they're often predictable. It's funny because you see clearly in hindsight.

1:34The problem starts because we stop talking to our customers and start guessing. In the research I mentioned earlier, there's something called a delivery gap that shows that 80 % of companies think they deliver a superior experience. Only 8 % of customers actually agree. Look at the disparity. Look at that gap. The translation is the plateau that you're experiencing is usually caused by a perception gap, that perception being yours. You think things are going better than they actually are. Sometimes you get caught up optimizing every single channel in our business. We do it to death and we forget to ship new value to customers to show them that we continue to care about them.

2:17We cling to yesterday's assumptions about price, about positioning, about ideal customer, and the market moves on. And our perceptions of how our business is doing is way off. The good news is, if the problem is mostly internal, the solution is in your control. Way better than blaming the economy or the market. I want to share a quick story. At 100 Ninja My Software Company that I grew for 10 years and then we got acquired recently, we sprinted to our first 1 ,000 paying customers. Then the graph started to flatten and it started to get scary. And my knee jerk reaction is like, do more marketing.

2:52That was my instinct to do more marketing. And that instinct almost drove us to the ground. What worked actually is that we got on calls, we spoke to customers, we watched users stumble in the onboarding, we kind of had heat maps and graphs and analyze how people are using our software, using our product. And we added a lot of improvements, including like an in app walkthrough and wizard to create your webinar in 10 seconds flat. We started doing this and then our trial conversions lifted, our churn dropped, growth returned. It's not magic. It's really about understanding the reality of your customers.

3:31It's connecting with your customers, finding out where they're getting stuck or what they're not happy with and fixing that problem. Next, I want to talk about the five levers I have found that allows you to break through and break plateaus. The first lever is obsess over retention before acquisition. Let me say that again. You want to obsess, be totally obsessed about retaining customers and keeping them on as long as possible and continuing to have them buy from you before you worry about acquisition. This is especially important if you have any kind of reoccurring billing, any kind of reoccurring subscription or membership, whether it's a software, whether it's a consulting and you're on a retainer, whether it's a course membership or community, you are selling month over month, year after year, and you need to retain these customers to continue to earn from these customers.

4:25If revenue is a leaky bucket, more leads just makes a bigger mess. Let me tell you why this unlocks growth. A 5 % retention lift keeping your customers can boost profits 25%, to 95%. That's compounding at its best, right? That's the power of compounding with zero extra ad spend. So tomorrow you could do this task to start reaping the benefits of this. First thing you want to do is you want to email 12 of your best customers, book six calls minimum of 20 minutes each. And you're going to ask your customers, what were they trying to solve when they bought your product? What almost made them not buy?

5:10And then ask them, what felt clunky after you bought it? And what surprised you? What did you enjoy? Get some answers from them. These are golden questions because the answers will tell you where to focus. It'll tell you what to fix. It'll tell you what to continue to double down on. One of the things I have found to be a incredible tool for attention is onboarding. You want to onboard your customers as soon as they buy your product or service so they get the most out of your product. You want to make sure that they get a win as quickly as possible. But in order for that to happen, you got to really embrace brevity.

5:46You got to embrace speed. So if your onboarding email is 1200 words with three philosophy quotes and no CTA button, congrats, you created a novella. Not an activation plan. Lover number two, build a lightweight experiment engine. Experiments are the name of the game in business. You want to take tiny experiments seriously because they're going to allow you to improve incrementally. I have found that plateaus die when experiments start. The team that wins is the one that runs the most tests as quickly as possible. Harvard Business Review has a classic piece on online experiments, and it shows systematically that when there are teams that experiment and do tests across product or pricing about across ux across offers it drives outsized growth and they become the market leader so whatever you do in your business if you run a youtube channel if you run a podcast if you run a blog whatever it is you have to run as many experiments as possible so that you can know what works what doesn't and then you can double down on what does and the reason why you will win is because the others are not doing it.

6:57This is what I've learned. One place to start if you're like, where do I start? Find 10 small things you can experiment with, whether it's your price, whether it's your landing page, whether it's your homepage, your website, whether it's your onboarding emails, 10 small experiments in 30 days, small things that you can change that you can reverse back if it's not working out, and something that you can measure, something you can actually get a number and say, okay, it is getting better. No, it's not getting better. lever number three reposition the offer not just the product people buy when the promise is specific and the path feels short remember buyers love to buy products that feel effortless to get the result they're looking for you want to tighten the promise get more leads is a good promise right get more leads book two to three qualified calls a week in 21 days these are clear promises this is what you're going to get.

7:52This is the promise. Bundle for outcomes, package tutorials, templates, live reviews, tools, whatever you can to make sure they have everything they need to get that result. You want to use all those tools, all those resources around your product to ensure they actually get a win so that they say, yes, this is the product I've been looking for. It's not actually the product itself only, but all the things that you include with it. If your sales page reads like a horoscope with vague language like abundance and alignment and plenty of money or whatever it might be, your buyer is still squinting to find the actual outcome.

8:31You need to be as specific as possible. You need to be as clear as possible so they can see the picture and understand what they're buying. Lever number four, restack your channels. Sometimes the message is right, the distribution is tapped out. You want to do a quick audit. Where did your last 50 customers come from? Find out. Speak to them. Look at your Google Analytics. Get some data. Double down on the top two. So for example, if you found out that out of those 50 customers, the top two places they came from or said they heard about you was like Facebook and your email newsletter, then you want to really double down on those two and continue to be a beast on Facebook and continue to be really top quality when it comes to email marketing.

9:19Now, when you do this audit and you find out, oh, out of the 50 customers, only one, maybe two customers came from X channel, and I'm spending 10 hours a week trying to work on that channel. Let's say, for example, it's TikTok. You know, you don't really need to focus on it anymore. You're not actually getting a lot of traction versus or compared to the effort you're putting into it. You can actually take that effort and put into the things that are actually converting, like email and Facebook in this example. So you want to reallocate your energy and budget to the things that actually work. Don't be afraid to do this.

9:51In the software world, this is often called killing your darlings, okay, where you kill off features in a software that customers are not using. And this bloats the software, makes it more complicated, there's more prone to bugs. And if even though you worked really hard on these features, and they're built, you know, you're like, what's the point of killing it? Well, because it costs you money and energy to maintain. And same thing with marketing, costs you money and energy to maintain those channels. And they're not really helping you. In fact, a lot of ways they could be hurting you. Lever number five, fixed cash and capacity.

10:24CB Insights ranks running out of cash and no market need among the top reasons startups fail. Translation means that you don't manage your business's finances properly. That's how you go out of business. Or you're solving a problem that's not a problem. I'm going to give you a prime example of how businesses fix problems that don't need fixing. The gym I go to just got bought out by another company. So I have this wonderful gym I love. there's basketball courts that I shoot and shooting machines and I wait gym and I love this gym to death and I have an annual membership because I love it so much.

10:58But then they got bought out by another company, new company, right? This new company then starts fixing and changing things that don't need fixing. For example, to get into the gym, there's like a scanner that you have to use your, you got to open up their app and then it kind of opens up the door through the app. And then you go into the gym and there's other doors in the gym that you have access to. So if you know, depending on your membership. But the point is that this app is constantly crashing. Sometimes it doesn't open the door. People are driving 15, 20 minutes to get to this gym, and then they can't even get in, right?

11:31And they have to knock on the door and ask somebody to open the door. Hopefully somebody sees them. It's a big headache. Before that, we just had this little plastic fob on our key ring, and it opened the door every single time without fail. We don't need the app to open up the door anymore. You can have the app for other things. You're fixing a problem that doesn't need fixing. Instead, you need to look at what problems your customers have and fix those. Learn what is causing a lot of pain for your customer, rather trying to improve something that doesn't really need to improve. Plus, it's super critical.

12:02Can't get into the gym in my example. That's super critical. It's going to cause people to cancel. Let's shift back now to the finances. Add as much upfront cash in your business as possible so that you can make sure your revenue far exceeds your expenses. So this means adding annual plans with meaningful bonuses. This means securing bigger, longer deals, increasing your LTV or even your average revenue per customer, you know, using bonuses and upsells. That helps a lot. But you can't do this. You can't do any of this and know like what kind of bonuses to present or what kind of upsells you should offer if you don't speak to your customers, right?

12:42You need to interview your customers. You need to understand what problems they have so you can solve those other problems with your products and services through those means, whether it's an upsell, whether it's a bonus, whether it's a bundle. Now, if you're wondering, where do I stand in my plateau status or if I'm about to plateau? Well, I'm going to give you a diagnostic test. If you're listening and you're driving right now, save this for later, go back to it and make sure that you write this down. If you aren't driving, then stop, open up your notes app, open up a piece of paper and a pen.

13:13Let's do it. You want to score each of these zero to two and anything that's less than one gets attention this week. Okay. First one, customer truth. When did you last interview five customers? Is it less than 90 days or more than 90 days? So this is either the zero or two. Pop it in. Activation. What percentage of your customers in their first seven days get a win? Okay, give yourself a score of zero to two. Number three, retention. Do your customers stay with you for at least 90 days? Number four, pricing power. Have you raised prices or added premium packaging in the last six months? Number five, experiment velocity.

13:51Have you tested and shipped those tests out and learned something in the last 30 days? Number six, channel concentration. Do you have one channel that is more than 60 % of your revenue? You want to make sure that you diversify your channels. Number seven, cash and capacity. How many months of runway do you have? Okay, runway means how much money, if you didn't earn another dollar, can you last and stay in business? So basically, how many months of expenses do you have? In my opinion, you should always have 12 months of expenses ready to go just in case you never earn another dollar so that you have a stable business.

14:23If you're wondering, oh, I don't have 12 months, that's a lot of money. Well, two things. One, either you've got to lower your expenses and you should have higher margins, or two, let's save some money to make sure that this happens. We're not overspending in our business. Take a look at all seven. Look at your scores. Fix the lowest scored items first. That's your bottleneck. Let me share with you a quick story from my days in software, running my software company for 10 years before we got acquired. Those 10 years, basically, I was solving one problem after another, improving, optimizing, doing all the things I mentioned in today's episode, okay?

14:56So this story I call the demo switch. When signups started to flatten and our trials started to kind of dry up, we added a live weekly demo. This was very early on, about, I would say, 18 months into Webinar Ninja. We started doing weekly demos, a weekly webinar, to simplify the onboarding based on customer calls. We spoke to customers who realized that they need help creating the actual webinar content so that they can actually run their first webinar with our software and get a win. So we ran webinars for our customers so that they can know how to put their first webinar together. Now, we actually ran this webinar, invited people that are not customers, and then they were asking in the chat, hey, this sounds great.

15:43How do I run my first webinar? What software should I use? Is it your software? How much? Call to action. new customer. Nice. So we kind of had two birds in one stone. We ran demos to help our customers create webinars so they can get a win fast, as well as helping people that are new to the webinar world and looking to get started. So you can go ahead and take that strategy, okay? You just got to find out what is the one thing that your customers have to overcome in order to get a win, in order for them to be successful with your product or service. Teach them how to do that, make it easier give them templates give them scripts give them everything they need so they have no excuse and they just have to give minimal effort so that they can get over this hump and offer that in a weekly webinar if you want to do that get on a zoom call do some coaching get some on your team to do this this is actually quite easy to do once you create this presentation your slide deck once you just repeat it over and over week after week this is also a great lead magnet by the way where people get free live coaching one of our students at the hundred LNBA was selling a$49 a month service to very small businesses and was really stuck.

16:49We're starting to plateau. So we helped them rebuild their offer and their offer was now$1 ,500 setup fee plus a$299 a month plan. So you could see it went from$49 a month to$299 a month plus the$1 ,500 one-time fee to set up. Now, what this did is it attracted a different customer, an upscale customer, and allowed them to have fewer clients with higher ARPU, higher profits, 5x profits actually, with no extra ad spend. Sometimes you just need to restructure what you're offering and that way you can attract your perfect customer. I got a couple more things we have to wrap up. This one is incredibly important and it's about your mindset.

17:36You need to reset your mindset. Plateaus are what I call wartime. I learned this from Ben Horowitz in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And he talks about every business goes through wartime sometimes. And most of the time you're in peacetime. But when you're in wartime, like a plateau in your business, you have to act differently. That doesn't mean to panic. It means to focus. Peacetime, you add features. You add interesting, delightful things for your customers. Wartime, you ship outcomes. You make sure your customers are getting every single thing and more that they're looking to achieve with your product or service.

18:16Piece time, you optimize content. War time, you get on the phone and you call the customers, right? And you talk to them directly. Piece time, you fiddle with your brand and your colors and your branding. War time, you fix activation and retention. See the difference? Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You are not broken. You're just between S-curves, if I'm going to use a snowboarding analogy. Every business that lasts outlives its first playbook, has to restructure, has to replan, and get past that plateau. The plateau is a signpost, not a verdict, right? It's a signpost for you to shift and to change and to grow.

18:55This week, I want you to talk to six customers. I want you to ship three experiments. I want you to give one part of your onboarding process a makeover. We want to make some tiny changes, some tiny fixes that's going to open some big doors. You've got this. Now go and open your door and get past this plateau. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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