10 Reasons your business isn’t growing. And how to fix it

By Jim Connolly | July 24, 2025

If you’re wondering, “Why isn’t my business growing?” this information packed article is written just for you. I’m going to share 10 extremely common reasons why your business is not growing that limit or stop the growth of a business, PLUS how to quickly turn things around.

Let’s get started.

Your business isn’t growing, because you stopped growing

Your business is a reflection of the decisions you make. Your decisions are based on what you know and how you feel about what you know. So, for your business to grow, you need to grow. After all, you can’t give your business the benefit of knowledge, which you don’t have.

How to fix it

Read the books. Study those who’ve achieved what you want to achieve. Seek expert advice. Grow. Then watch your business grow too.

Your business is not growing because you’re selling based on price

Your prospective clients can go to Google and find a lower priced alternative in seconds. If they can’t, your pricing is almost certainly way too low. It takes a huge amount of planning and a watertight strategy, to sell based on being lowest priced and still make a worthwhile profit. Some big brands manage to succeed on wafer thin margins, but it’s a very precarious approach. In the very unpredictable economy of 2026, this is just too risky.

Usually, small businesses only market based on being low priced, because it’s easy to lower prices or fees. It takes very little effort. It takes even less creativity. You simply undercut your competitors. We call this the race to the bottom. It’s a race you don’t want to win, as you end up working for peanuts and attracting the lowest value clients.

Note: Clients you attract through low fees are the easiest to lose. Price-focused buyers will jump ship as soon as they learn of a lower priced alternative to you.

How to fix it

Instead of selling based on being the lowest priced, look for opportunities to pump more value to what you do. Not only will this make your business more profitable, it will allow you to compete for better clients… those who value you and what you do.

Your business isn’t growing because you’ve camouflaged yourself

This is one of the most common mistakes made by small business owners. Very, very few small businesses stand out. Perhaps 1 in every 10,000. Instead, they opt for the fake safety of being just like their competitors.

This is why we find that when we look at the providers in any industry, they seem so similar. You could swap them around and no one would notice.

They offer a similar range of services. They make similar promises. They charge similar fees. In effect, they become invisible. Almost impossible to tell apart.
They have camouflaged themselves within the masses.

How to fix it

If you want to stand out, do something outstanding. Something remarkable. Something uniquely valuable. Find a new service, which your competitors don’t provide. Develop a new pricing model.

Just don’t be like all the others, if you want to get noticed.

You’re associating with the wrong people

There’s a direct link between how we think, and the people we habitually associate with.

If we associate with people who inspire us, we feel inspired.
If we associate with people who encourage us and motivate us to stretch, we grow.

That’s why it pays to be selective regarding the people we associate with. For example, when we associate with people who are doing better than we are, the natural inclination is for us to rise to their level.

Of course, the opposite is also true. When we associate with people who are pessimists, people who complain, people whose businesses are going nowhere, people who blame the economy, people who gossip… we can soon find ourselves with everything they have!

As Jim Rohn used to tell us: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”. That average may have changed over the years since my mentor’s passing, but the concept remains true.

How to fix it

Choose wisely. Associate with people who will inspire you to be better. People who will encourage you and motivate you to be the best you can be.

You’re connecting with the wrong people

In business, it’s extremely important to build great connections with influential people. This is the exact opposite of what the typical small business owner does. They go for numbers instead, and look in the worst possible places.

Think about it: We’ve all met business owners who struggle to find new clients, even though they’re members of a networking group and have hundreds, maybe thousands of Linkedin contacts.

That should be impossible.

Right?

Surely, with so many contacts, these struggling business owners would be able to reach out with a message and quickly attract more client enquiries than they need. However, this never happens. Why? Because they are connected to business owners who lack the influence and contacts, to be able to make a difference!

How to fix it

The most successful business owners use the exact opposite approach. I recommend you do the same. It looks like this: They deliberately target the most influential people in their marketplace and put a strategy together, to connect with them. They do this months before they ask anything from them.

And no, you will not find the most influential people in networking clubs, asking struggling business owners for introductions. You’ll have to do a little research. But that’s fine. You’re aiming for quality, not numbers.

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You’re starving your business of the marketing it needs

No matter how great your business is, unless you market it effectively, no one will know. Sadly, it’s a fact that an average business that’s marketed correctly, will always outperform a wonderful business that has ineffective marketing. This is why some lousy businesses make a fortune, whilst some great businesses struggle.

By starving your business of professional marketing, by default, you’re relying on amateur marketing. This makes no sense, as it is both more expensive, and vastly less effective, than getting expert help.

How to fix it

If you want great marketing results get the expert help you need.

Your business isn’t growing, because you’ve become comfortable

Small business owners usually start off with great plans, but somewhere along the way they settle. Instead of focusing on building their business, so it provides them with the rewards they want, they switch.

They switch to lowering their lifestyle expectations, so it meets the limitations of their under performing business.

How to fix it

It’s up to you to switch things back the way they should be! This means leaving your comfort zone, setting exciting goals and then making the commitment to take the action required.

You’re getting too few referrals, so your business isn’t growing

Business owners who get too few referrals have to quickly figure out why their clients and associates are not referring them. This is a tough challenge to face. It means accepting there’s a serious problem and then being willing to fix things.

Yes, it’s serious, extremely serious, if you get too few referrals.

Not only are you missing out on a regular supply of valuable leads, your clients and associates, for whatever reason, do not want to recommend you. And there’s always a reason.

How to fix it

A customer survey may help you find out why. However, honest conversations with those whose opinions you trust are often extremely useful too.

Just as importantly, when you get the feedback you need, make sure you do something with it. It’s hard sometimes to accept you have areas of your business, which you need to improve. I’ve seen business owners ignore really valuable feedback, believing they’re already offering an amazing service.

Don’t make that mistake. Listen to what the feedback is telling you. Then take appropriate action.

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You’re not failing often enough

Many small business owners let their fear of failure stop them from putting their ideas into action. The challenge with that mindset, is that without trying fresh ideas, you stagnate by default.

When a business is new it’s easy to risk everything. After all, unless you start out with a ton of money behind you, (like Sir Richard Branson and Seth Godin), you have nothing to lose.

However, once your business is established the penalty for failing seems bigger.

Here’s why:

Business owners tend to over estimate the price of failure. They imagine all kinds of unrealistic worst case scenarios.
To make things worse, they also tend to under estimate the potential rewards. They seem unaware that just one good idea can improve their business beyond recognition.

The fear of failure is the biggest hurdle to your success. It robs you of opportunity. It causes you to play it safe, which is the riskiest thing a business owner can do.

How to fix it

Interestingly, the most successful business owners see failure very differently.

It looks like this:

If they try something and it doesn’t work, they learn from it. They then invest the lesson in their next idea. This makes them far more likely to succeed the next time. So, they win.
If they try something and it works, they learn from it and earn from it. So, they win.

That mindset regarding failure is what I recommend you work on. It was an area of my own development that needed a lot of improvement. But when you learn the commercial value of failure, everything starts to fall into place. It’s like removing a blockage that’s been a barrier to your success. You will never look back.

Now what?

If your business isn’t growing the way you want it to, it’s likely that several or more of those 10 reasons require your attention. Put them right and you’ll enjoy the rewards. So, take some time today to focus on just one of those points. The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll achieve the results you know you deserve.

Here’s how the best paid service providers earn the highest fees

By Jim Connolly | July 21, 2025

If you’re a service provider, your income is based on just 2 things.

1. The value you bring. This is what determines how much your clients pay you. Between the best paid and the lowest paid, there can be a factor of hundreds and hundreds of percent. Here’s an example I have used many times. My friend hired a photographer for a product shoot in London. The person he hired charged £17,000 for the shoot. The lowest quote for the same shoot, on the same date, with the same remit, was just over £900.

2. How well you market the value you bring. This is what attracts the attention of your prospective clients. It’s what communicates your value in a way that motivates people to hire you.

Each of those areas can be improved. And by focusing on both areas, they leverage one another. When this happens, it radically improves everything for you.

Compounded for spectacular results

That’s right. You get the financial reward of charging 5x, 10x or whatever. Plus, you’re also attracting more clients. These combine and compound. The results are transformational.

The best part (other than the massive financial rewards)? All of this is possible, by focusing your attention and activity on just 2 things.

Business owners who work on those areas correctly, don’t just improve their results. They dramatically improve everything about their business and their financial future. This isn’t marginal gains I’m talking about. It’s life-changing. You know what always amazes me? Most service providers reading this will find it compelling, or at least very interesting. And they will do nothing.

Consider this for a moment.

Think about how amazing things would be for you at the end of 2025, if you decided now to do something, so you can correctly apply those 2 ideas.

You can do it.

How do I know?

Because I’ve literally lost count of how many people I have seen go from charging average and below average fees, to charging vastly more and enjoying all the benefits that brings.

12 Quick tips that are great for your business

By Jim Connolly | July 15, 2025

It’s good for your business…

When you feed your mind with rich mental protein and take care of your body.

When you make short-term decisions that are consistent with your long-term plans.

When you hire amazing people and pay them what they’re worth.

When you build a reputation as a trusted source of value.

When you connect with the right kind of people.

When you pause to reflect before saying, publishing or sending anything important.

When you start each morning thinking about the things you’re grateful for.

When you start your working day, writing a list of things you want to achieve. And close each day, with a review of the things you’ve learned.

When you build your primary marketing channel on a platform you control, such as your website or newsletter. Social media platforms change their rules and algorithms, which can have a devastating impact on your business.

When you treat different clients differently, according to their unique needs.

When you make promises to your clients and deliver on them.

When you learn to absolutely LOVE what you do. Because work becomes joy and this improves literally everything.

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Give it away

By Jim Connolly | July 8, 2025

Here’s a very quick tip, which can dramatically improve things across your entire business.

As someone who has mentored thousands of people over the years, I’ve found that the reason a business isn’t doing great, is often because the business owner isn’t feeling great. Perhaps they don’t feel as motivated, confident or inspired as they would like to be.

The reason this matters is that our feelings guide our decisions, and our decisions guide our actions. These actions are what determine our results and therefore the success of our business.

I’ve discovered that the fastest way to genuinely become motivated, confident, inspired (or experience any positive feeling), is for you to give these feelings to others.

Allow me to explain.

My epiphany

I noticed that whenever a client or friend came to me because they were, for example, lacking motivation, and I started to build up their motivation, it always left me feeling massively more motivated.

Then I noticed the exact same thing happened when I helped people feel more confident, inspired, courageous, resourceful, optimistic, fired up or anything else. I would immediately feel radically stronger in whatever area I’d helped them with.

I shared this idea with others and found they had identical, or very similar experiences to mine.

Here’s what makes this so powerful.

When you give these amazing feelings to others, you become a source of the very thing you give. And it’s an endless source. Because as long as you keep giving, you’ll keep receiving.

It’s a simple technique, which can strengthen the core of everything you do. And you can access it as often as you want to. I use it daily.

Interestingly, this process works regardless of how you do it; face-to-face, Zoom, phone, email, one-to-one / a group of people, social media, podcast, blog post, a handwritten note or any other form of communication.

The next time you want to think more productively and make better business decisions, identify the key feeling or feelings you’re lacking in. Then give others those same feelings.

Don’t wait for motivation, energy, confidence, creativity, calmness or anything else to arrive. Give it away and make it appear.

It’s a wonderful way to enrich yourself, and by extension, enrich others.

The false assumptions that destroy your results

By Jim Connolly | June 30, 2025

wrong assumptions, marketing, assumptions danger

Photo: Pexels

Your sales numbers aren’t adding up. You know you should be attracting more clients. But something’s clearly not working. The culprit? A good place to look is false assumptions.

When marketing campaigns fall flat or client acquisition stalls, we naturally look for tactical fixes. But the real problem often runs deeper. It’s not that your execution is wrong. It’s that your entire approach is built on faulty premises.

I’ve seen this pattern countless times. A business owner pours energy into strategies that feel logical, but rely on assumptions that simply aren’t correct.The numbers can’t add up when the foundation is flawed.

Let me show you exactly what I mean, with a common example that might sound familiar.

Failing to check the source

Small business owners are often poorly advised. If they wrongly assume the advice is correct when it’s false, and then follow the advice, they’ll lose money, waste time and miss opportunities.

The golden rule here is to always check the source of advice, before you act on it.

For example, if a sincere friend or contact gives you marketing advice, make sure they have the marketing background required. As Jim Rohn used to tell us, ‘sincerity is not a test of truth. It’s possible to be sincerely wrong!’.

Equally, before you pay for advice from a marketing provider, check them out. As you may have already discovered, there are plenty of ineffective marketing providers out there.

The easiest way to check a marketing provider out is to look at how they market their own business.

Effective marketing providers attract clients via referral and reputation; so people already know us and our work long before they hire us.

Ineffective marketing providers are unable to attract enough clients or get enough referrals. You find them at networking events hunting for clients or on Linkedin pestering people for leads. That’s a huge red flag.

Here’s another cause of false assumptions.

You don’t need more leads

Imagine the following scenario.

A small business owner urgently needs more sales or more new clients. However, they make a false assumption. They wrongly assume they need more sales leads or client leads.

Their focus is now on lead acquisition tactics, when it should be on sales acquisition tactics or client acquisition tactics. As a result, they get leads, maybe lots of leads, but too few additional sales or new clients. In short, they got what they went for, leads, but they went for the wrong thing.

For those who don’t know, in almost every case, you will attract clients or customers massively faster without spending time or money on lead acquisition or advertising. Only after direct, faster, highly profitable options have been deployed would I ever consider lead generation.

What next?

When it comes to marketing your business, make it a habit to never assume anything. Check your sources. Ask relevant questions. If you do, you will dramatically increase your chances of finally getting the results you deserve.

Hard work isn’t enough (here’s what is)

By Jim Connolly | June 24, 2025

One component of successful marketing, is knowing what needs to be done.

A second component of successful marketing, is to put that knowledge into action.

And an essential third component of successful marketing, is to keep on doing what’s required. Once things start moving, they need to keep on moving. Lasting success requires an ongoing effort. Continuous forward movement.

Marketing momentum: the mover of mountains that’s easy to lose

Marketing momentum is where your intelligent activity (doing the right things, correctly) combines, to attract the results you want. For example, an increasing number of; sales leads, sales conversions, client enquiries, new clients, proposal requests, bid requests, client referrals, new subscribers, media requests… exciting times for sure.

Here’s the reason I’m sharing this with you: once you’ve created marketing momentum, that momentum must be maintained and sustained.

You need to keep actioning your ideas.
You need to carry on looking for great opportunities.
You need to turn up again and again and again.
You need to consistently review and increase your targets or goals, as old ones are achieved.
You need to remain dedicated to improving how your business operates.
You need to keep working your plans.
You need to carry on delighting your clients.
You need to stay on the lookout for people who can improve your business.
You need to repeatedly make big, exciting promises and then deliver.

Doing all of the above is easy at the start, especially if you have an existential need for more clients or more customers.

But when all the important marketing numbers are moving in the right direction and things are going great, finding the motivation to keep your marketing momentum moving forward can become harder. And momentum soon fizzles out when left unattended.

This is something I work on regularly with new clients. Interestingly, very few ever think it will be a problem for them. This is largely because when people hire me, they do so when they’re looking for fast, massive increases in sales and financial results. They’re in the ideal mindset for creating momentum.

But.

As things start to improve, with exciting results moving all their important numbers in the right direction, almost every client I’ve ever had unconsciously thinks they’ve now arrived. That this new level of success is a destination. Irreversible, so long as they work hard.

They forget they were already working hard before hiring me… and hard work didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Hard work by itself is not enough for ongoing success. So, ride the wave of momentum and keep moving forward.