The Day Your Business Stops Wanting More Customers

There’s a bizarre moment in the life of any business that few seem to discuss

It comes when the owner realizes they’re no longer in danger of not having enough customers.

For months or even years, growth has felt like the natural goal: more visitors, more enquiries, more sales, more followers, more brand-awareness — anything to get the business out there, seen, heard, discovered.

Then, something happens where their company becomes busier, but not better.

More inquiries mean more emails to answer, more mistakes to reverse and less time to spend with existing customers, despite what they may think.

Marketing budgets grow without a tangible payoff in terms of value per sale.

At this point, it’s time to ask a different question than “how can we get more customers?”, such as

“what if I made it much easier to serve the customers that I already have?”

Growth Can Create a Problem Nobody Foresees

Growth is seen by companies as this straight line.

More customers generate more revenue, more resources and therefore more capacity to serve more customers.

The truth is rarely that simple, however, and the bigger you grow, the more likely things are to go wrong for no apparent reason.

Imagine running a small business with twenty-five regular clients.

You know most of them by name, and can answer their questions quickly. You spot problems instantly. You can check the important things by hand. You know where the important information is because it’s in your head.

Now imagine growing the business to two hundred customers.

The income goes up, but now you start noticing teething problems.

A customer has to repeat an issue to you multiple times. An important document is misplaced by an employee. You miss a request amongst the flood of emails. A customer service representative promises something the operations team didn’t know about.

Not because people are bad at their jobs

But because the system that supported them previously didn’t scale as quickly as the business did

One of the costs companies rarely consider with growth is the hidden value of making things easier.

Making Work Easier Doesn’t Always Mean Making It More Technological

When companies consider technology as a tool to help them grow, it’s tempting to look at bigger and more impressive options.

Artificial intelligence. More automation. Better analytics. New software. Bigger dashboards. More complicated apps.

The truth is, sometimes, the most powerful improvements are the ones that take something easier off people.

A shared document can reduce the number of emails between people. An automated reminder can stop a customer from forgetting to provide something important. A well-documented procedure can allow a brand new employee to solve a common problem without asking anyone for help. A better website can answer a question customers would otherwise ask.

None of these improvements sound revolutionary when taken individually

but collectively they can transform the entire perception someone has of a business.

Your Best Customer Might Already Be One Of Your Customers

Another reason companies are so fascinated with acquiring more customers is that it’s very simple to measure.

A campaign got 500 visitors. An advert had 30 enquiries. A landing page got 2000 views. Simple figures that can be added together.

What’s far less obvious is the customer who chose to stay with the company because everything was so simple.

That customer may not appear in your acquisition dashboard, but they’ll probably be back.

And they’ll probably be recommending the business.

And they’ll buy more products from you.

They’ll stop looking at competitors because they trust your company. They’ll stick with you long-term.

Over time, these silent customers can have a phenomenal impact.

That’s not to say companies shouldn’t acquire new customers. It’s to say that customer acquisition shouldn’t be prioritized over the experience you create for the people who have already selected you.

The Real Competitive Advantage Might Be Fewer Barriers

It’s possible for two companies to sell very similar products at similar prices, but create massively differing experiences for their customers.

One will make people search for answers. The other will give them straight away.

One will require multiple emails to get something done. The other will make the process clear. One will send a generic message after every interaction, while the other will always remember what the customer actually needed.

The difference between the two is friction, and customers rarely speak about these differences in business-specific jargon.

Instead, they’ll say things like “one is much easier to deal with than the other”.

That can be a huge advantage to whoever has made their operations easier for their clients, as convenience can often be mistaken — or incorporated — for an actual difference in product.

A company doesn’t always need to fundamentally change its product offering to stand out in a market. It might just need to make it a little simpler to use.

Stop Automating Things That Shouldn’t Exist In The First Place

There’s a trap companies fall into with technology that’s very counterintuitive.

Once a company discovers a new form of automation, it’s tempting to look at everything else they do and automate it too.

The problem is, adding another form of automation to a broken process rarely fixes the issue.

If a customer has to complete six unnecessary steps to get what they want, adding an automated system to complete those six steps doesn’t fix the problem: it just accelerates the process.

Before companies dedicate real resources to automating something that’s currently done manually, the most important question they can ask is

“Why does this even exist in the first place?”

Perhaps you can remove an approval step. Perhaps you can combine two forms into one. Perhaps you can stop making customers ask for things that should be obvious. Perhaps you can stop employees doing repetitive tasks like copying information between systems.

The biggest technological improvements are sometimes found in removing something, rather than adding something new.

A Business Should Know WhenNot To Measure Something

Modern companies have so many tools they can use to measure what matters to them.

Traffic, clicks, conversions, open rates, customer acquisition cost, revenue, time spent on page, engagement.

The list goes on, and is only limited by the imagination of whoever is in charge of measurement.

Having lots of information on a topic is always useful, but there is one problem that comes up frequently in companies: they end up measuring what they can measure, rather than what is important

A company might congratulate themselves on an increase in traffic, while missing that most visitors left as soon as they got there.

They might rejoice at more sales, while failing to notice they’ve seen a drop in revenues elsewhere.

They might celebrate a jump in enquiries, without realising employees can barely keep up.

The point is, numbers rarely tell the whole story.

A useful metric isn’t simply one that is increasing or decreasing: it’s one that gives context around whether something is working.

The Next Phase Of Growth Might Be About Simplicity

There’s an idea that successful companies grow more complicated as they go on.

New departments, new software, new meetings, new products, new campaigns, new systems.

Sometimes, the opposite is true.

As companies grow, they realize some of the complications they added weren’t necessary, and move towards streamlined, more focussed ways of doing business.

That can mean fewer meetings, clearer responsibilities, shorter journeys for customers, improved documentation and more powerful technology that reduces repetition.

The mature business is rarely the one doing the most in the marketplace — it’s the one that knows exactly what it should be doing and how to do it.

The One Question To Ask Before The Next Big Investment

Before making a potentially enormous investment in the next big thing for the company, an owner can ask themselves one surprisingly simple question: 

“What is making our business harder than it needs to be right now?”

The answer could surprise them, as it often doesn’t come from the obvious places.

Perhaps customers are waiting too long for help. Perhaps employees are doing routine manual tasks. Perhaps the website is causing confusion. Perhaps a very profitable service is being undermined by an unnecessarily complicated process. Perhaps the business is gaining a lot of attention, but not enough customers.

None of these are glamorous issues to address.

However, they’re all incredibly useful ones to consider before making a large investment.

The Business That Makes It Easier To Operate Can Often Be Harder To Beat

The best companies aren’t always the most vocal about what they do.

Some grow steadily, without massive announcements, because their customers know what to expect, their employees understand how to deliver on it, and their systems don’t put up roadblocks to getting it done.

That sort of business can often sidestep traditional issues associated with growth, such as chasing trends, because they don’t need to — their operations are already optimized to a degree where new technology, new marketing and new expansion opportunities simply fit in naturally rather than requiring a complete overhaul of everything else.

This kind of organization also has the advantage of knowing when not to adopt something new.

As companies grow, it’s a common mistake to implement a solution before they’ve understood the exact problem it’s meant to solve.

A strong company will know what its problems are, and have the tools to solve them.

Most importantly, it’ll know when a problem simply isn’t worth solving. There are a lot of inefficiencies that exist simply because they’ve always been there.

That’s not always an issue – companies need to operate within realistic parameters.

However, it can also lead to a business creating more problems for itself than it needs to.

If growth is seen as adding more and more layers to operations, it’s important to remember that the alternative is making things simpler for everyone involved.

Making work simpler can sometimes be as simple as removing unecessary steps in a process.

It can sometimes mean getting rid of confusing or outdated elements of a product.

It can mean streamlining communication, or adopting better technology to reduce repetition.

It can mean saying “no” to projects that make the business look bigger without actually helping.

And it can mean realizing that, sometimes, the best definition of modern business growth is not building a company that can handle more, but one that needs less to succeed.