Three reasons I see contracting companies plateau in their business.
First, number one, no clear vision of where you want to go.
You’ve basically started from the beginning, you got real busy, you get to that one or two million dollar mark, and then you just kind of stuck there for a while. I mean, there’s different plateaus in business. There’s that five to $700,000, one to 1.5 million, two to three, five to seven, you kind of hit those different plateau points. What happens is there’s no clear vision of where you’re going. Without a clear vision, you just wake up every day, work real hard, and hope that you figure it out. And then you just keep kind of repeat, repeat, repeat. You don’t make any changes. You don’t adapt. You don’t evolve because you don’t really know what you’re doing and what you’re going to build. So creating a vision will be the first thing you need to do to help overcome the plateau.
What is the next iteration? I look at base camps.
When you’re going to summit Mount Everest, you go up the base camps. You get to a base camp, you sit there for a little bit to acclimate, and then you have to move to the next one. So I look at looking at base camps. So not what is the end goal because like the end goal so far away and so big and so grandiose it might be hard to visualize that, but you can visualize what the next base camp is, right? So if you’re at base camp one doing 500, okay, what does your business look like at $1.5mil or what does your business look like at five million? What are the employees? What kind of clients? What kind of equipment? What do you need? What does it look like? And then go manufacture that. But I see that happen all the time. They get so busy working in their business, they forget to build a vision of where it’s going.
Number two, they make hires based on immediate needs, not future needs.
They hire somebody quickly, maybe not the right person, maybe just the body, maybe just the person they get access to, and that person’s not really built to help them scale. They’re not built for that next level. They’re there for what you’re doing right now. You probably have had that person that’s really good for that first six months and then all of the sudden they didn’t get better or they weren’t bringing as much value is because the business grew or the problem grew or the size of their job description grew and they did not evolve with it because you hired them based on their skill sets for the existing problems, not future needs.
And one of the biggest, I’ll say, piece of advice I ever heard is like make sure you’re hiring people that can be promotable. Don’t just hire them for what they can do right now. Hire them for like a position that they could promote into as the business scales, as the machine grows. Hiring somebody that’s promotable from day one. Like, “Hey. You’re going to do this job, but I’m building you to be this person within the company, this key leadership role.”
Number three, fear.
Doubt is ultimately like you’re doing really well and you feel like you don’t deserve it. You feel like you can’t handle. You feel like you’re not built for it. You feel like you basically are not evolving. That doubt, that fear, comes from you are not getting better as a leader. So one of the biggest ones is people start to like break their own stuff to make sure they don’t get overly successful or more successful than they can handle or bigger than they think that they’re built for.
You get what I’m trying to say. When you have that stopping point, when you have that point where it’s time for you to evolve as the leader, where it’s time for you to measure up, it’s time for you to get better, it’s time for you to dream bigger, you get scared. Fear creeps in, doubt creeps in. You guys have heard me talk about the zero doubt mentality. Like there’s always going to be fear. You just can’t have doubt in your ability to overcome it. Like you have survived every major obstacle your business has thrown at you to date and most of you are probably bigger, better, badder than you used to be. Even though you ran into all those problems, but you look at the next problems, you just believe you won’t be able to overcome them. You believe that you’re going to get stuck.
You believe you’re going to fail. Whatever that might be. That’s where most people plateau because they don’t want to get better. They don’t want to evolve. They don’t want to change the way they’re doing things to get different results. So the three things in recap, the vision wasn’t there. You’re just working hard every day hoping that it gets better. Two, you’re not hiring to solve next problems. You’re hiring to solve existing problems so your team inherently is not able to evolve as the company evolves. So you end up hitting that plateau of the skillset of the people that you’re hiring. And then third is you, you as the business owner, stop evolving. You start getting scared. You stop taking chances. When you had nothing, you would risk everything. Now that you have a little something, you’re afraid to lose it. That will absolutely stop you in your tracks and make it very difficult for you to scale beyond wherever you are stuck right now.
Look, this is what we do. This is what WinRate’s about. This is what the coaches on my team are about. Everybody who’s a part of our coaching staff has been through the challenges you’re going through. That’s what we do. Like we’ve built companies on our own. Now I’ve brought the right people together to help make an impact for more people. So if you’re interested in coaching, you’re interested in finding out more, if you’re a good fit for us and we’re good fit for you, go to winrateconsulting.com, fill out the form. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s give you some free advice. Let’s help you figure out what the next steps are and see if there’s a role we can play to help you overcome those challenges so that you can win fast and win often.
