How the Right Questions Can Regain Business Growth

When growth starts getting harder, it’s tempting to look for something to fix.

Maybe it’s the website. Maybe marketing needs more behind it. The brand might feel a bit tired, or the way you talk about the business just isn’t landing like it used to.

Sometimes that’s exactly where the problem is. But it’s not where we start.

When a business hits a Growth Plateau, the thing that’s easiest to see isn’t always the thing holding it back.

A strategy workshop gives you the chance to get the right people around a table, talk about where the business is now and work out what might have changed along the way.

There’s always a temptation to get straight to the doing. But the conversations that happen before anything gets designed, built or launched are often the ones that matter most.

We start with questions, not answers

There’s something we love about that first conversation.

It’s where we get to forget about deliverables for a moment and properly get under the skin of the business.

We talk about where the business is heading, who its best customers really are, what people value about it and where the team thinks the biggest opportunities lie.

We listen closely. The interesting stuff often sits underneath the obvious answers.

A passing comment opens up a bigger conversation, or two people realise they’ve been looking at the same part of the business completely differently.

That’s usually where you start getting somewhere.

Disagreement is useful

We don’t expect everyone in a strategy workshop to agree. We’d probably be more concerned if they did.

Get a few people around a table talking about the values they think really define the business and it doesn’t take long to see where they agree, and where they don’t.

Ask the founder what makes the business special, then ask someone in sales. You might get two very different answers.

The aim isn’t to decide who’s right. It’s to get those perspectives out of people’s heads and into a conversation where everyone can do something useful with them.

For a business trying to regain momentum, those differences are worth understanding.

Then we look from the outside in

There are things about a business that become completely normal when you work inside it every day.

Customers don’t have that luxury.

If your business has spent the last ten years growing and changing, it’s easy to assume your customers have followed that journey with you. Chances are, they haven’t.

They only know the version of the business they see today.

That’s why it’s useful to put some of these things on the table and properly question them. Does the way you talk about the business still make sense? Does the website reflect what you’ve become? Are you speaking to the customers you actually want now, rather than the ones you wanted five years ago?

Your business has moved on. The question is whether everything around it has moved with you.

The workshop isn’t there to decide the answer in advance

This is probably the most important bit.

We don’t go into a strategy workshop assuming the answer is a rebrand, website or marketing campaign.

The conversations might point towards positioning. They might uncover something in the customer experience. They might show that the identity no longer reflects the business particularly well.

The point is to understand what we’re dealing with before deciding what to do about it.

We might still end up talking about the website, the brand or the marketing. But by then, we know why we’re talking about it.

And when a business is trying to get moving again, that makes for a much better starting point.