How do you know what to fix first in a growing business?

Growing businesses have an irritating habit of presenting several problems at once.

Sales may need attention, margins may be under pressure, somebody important may not be performing, customers may be asking for more and the team may still need too much direction from you. Meanwhile you are trying to recruit, improve the way things work and think about where the next stage of growth will come from.

The danger is not that nothing gets done.

Quite often too much gets done.

A new sales plan starts, costs are reviewed, somebody begins looking at a new system and managers are given another set of objectives. There is plenty of effort, but the business can still feel much the same six months later.

What I have learned is that action is not always the first thing a business needs. Sometimes it needs a clearer view of what is really holding it back.

If sales are poor, the answer may not be more sales activity. If profit is disappointing, cutting costs may not get to the heart of it. If people are not performing, changing the people may solve the problem, but only if the problem was genuinely theirs in the first place.

This is why I am wary of long lists of priorities.

Most businesses can produce twenty things they would like to improve without trying very hard. The useful work is deciding which one or two matter most now.

I usually come back to a few basic questions.

What is having the biggest effect on the business?

What is making other things harder?

If we improved one thing properly, which change would make the greatest difference elsewhere?

Those questions force you to choose.

That is important because time, money and management attention are limited, however ambitious the business may be. Spreading them across too many projects can create the feeling of progress without much real change.

Sometimes the answer becomes obvious when you take a little distance from the day to day noise. Sometimes it takes longer, particularly when you are close to every part of the business and have been living with the same issues for years.

Either way, I would rather have two priorities that genuinely matter than ten which all sound sensible.

A growing business will never run out of things that could be better.

The judgement lies in deciding what matters now and what can wait.