Is your business really growing?

It’s business as usual when you enter the office. Telesales orders continue to flow albeit intermittently, like a dried river becoming drenched in unseasonal rain. Employees are hired and fired, as fresh replacements suffice to take over the roles left behind.

Managers are squeezing newly arrived trainees, throwing them into the battle zone at the first sight.

Surely, nothing seems to be wrong here. Everything is like glimmer, until the sheen is rubbed off to reveal uncomfortable realities that lie beneath that gleaming  veneer.

‘Is your business really growing?’ might pop up at the back of the mind, amidst such perplexing doubts. As the old saying goes, the gut tells things that even a conscious mind shan’t reveal.

Experienced eyes reveal what others will not. The signs of decline are as follows (may not necessarily be all of them):

1. High attrition rate

New employees are hired and later fired from their jobs, which is not a good indicator as employee morale is low. This results in poor performance. Retaining expenditures are at an all time high. This affects corporate performance. That sales person, who left, had many clients who will not come back to the same company in his absence. Thus, long-term customers are lost in the process of firing or when the employee leaves.

2. Branding decay

While an effective advertisement ought to be the same if it continues to promote the brand, no new brand communication-taking place means no capitalizing on previous gains. This is where complacency can set in. The Ad world is highly competitive and if your product faces severe competition, then prepare to suffer the consequences.

3. Uneven sales

Fluctuating sales figures without any reasonable understanding of factors behind it means that the business brand image has not been sufficiently embedded in the consumer consciousness. Competitor offering and brand promotion are eroding sales figures and eating into it. It becomes important to address this
issue on an urgent basis.

4. The past was beautiful

There’s nothing in the company that you may call as ‘new’. It’s like that word has been culled from the dictionary. Every new business challenge is met with a standard response, ’We’ll do this the old way’. A sign of a rot set in seems outwardly to be very beautiful.

These are some of the warning signs when business isn’t going good. Most are ignored and only when calamity strikes that everybody comes back to reality.