Why businesses stop growing (and how to find the real constraint)

The five usual constraints

1. Demand: not enough of the right people know about you or are looking for what you sell.
2. Conversion: enough people arrive, but too few buy.
3. Retention: customers buy once and disappear, so you keep refilling a leaking bucket.
4. Capacity: operations, stock, cash or people can’t support more sales.
5. Decision-making: everything waits for the owner, so the business moves at the speed of one person’s calendar.

How to find yours

Work down the chain and look for the biggest drop compared with a reasonable benchmark or your own past:

• Is traffic or enquiry volume falling, flat or rising?
• Is conversion from visit or enquiry to sale stable?
• What share of revenue comes from repeat customers?
• Are you turning away orders, running out of stock or short of cash to buy more?
• How many decisions this month waited on one person?

The constraint is usually where the numbers changed first, or where people say “we’d grow if only…”.

From our work: [A plateau PURSHO diagnosed: the constraint everyone assumed, and the one it really was]

What to do next

Fix the constraint before anything else, measure the result, then look again. Once one constraint is solved, another becomes the bottleneck; that’s normal. A 90-day cycle works well: one constraint, one plan, one review.

This is the core of our growth consulting work.

How PURSHO approaches this

See how we help with this in Growth Consulting, or book a free 30-minute consultation. Related case study: Marketplace seller, [category].