You’ve been in business 5, 10, 15 years or more and it feels like your sales have peaked.  You want to push through this plateau and grow the business, but you can’t seem to achieve the explosive growth you desperately crave.

 

Don’t worry, you’re not alone.  The “Small Business Ceiling” is something entrepreneurs across the country experience year after year.  The burning question is; why?

 

The answer might surprise you, or it might not.  After all, it’s fairly obvious.  You need more customers.  Businesses consistently find themselves trapped in a phenomenon we call “The Small Business Ceiling” because they fail to learn how to scale customer acquisition through proper marketing practices.  

 

There are several potential causes of this phenomenon.  For starters, the word marketing is a dirty word to many business owners.  Entrepreneurs have been bamboozled by promises from silver-tongued marketing salespeople for years.  These promises quickly turn into disappointment as these fly by night marketing companies gobble up precious marketing dollars and deliver little to no results.  Business leaders quickly disengage and return to their comfort zone: Google marketing.

​

THE GOOGLE PROBLEM

 

Google, and the average entrepreneur’s reliance on it, is actually one of the causes of The Small Business Ceiling.  Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are 100% reliant on consumers entering keywords into a Google search query to produce results.  Unfortunately, there is a finite number of potential customers who will enter a query for your products or services each month and those customers are then divided among the other businesses relying on Google in that particular market.  While Google provides a consistent number of customers for those who are good at SEO and SEM, it creates a ceiling by forcing companies to share the limited number of opportunities amongst each other.

 

You could try to monopolize clicks by dramatically increasing your budget, but you may just drive up the cost of clicks, since your competitors will be forced to increase their budgets as well to stay alive.  Google wins in this cost inflating scenario. The entrepreneur loses.

​

THERE'S ONLY ONE OF YOU

 

The other primary resource of business for your average small business is Sphere of Influence marketing.  This includes people you know, and other relationships and referrals that ultimately generate business opportunities.  The problem with Sphere of Influence marketing is that unless you are in a small town where everyone knows you, it is limited to a small portion of your total marketplace.  So just like Google, you’re back to pulling customers from a limited pool of potential opportunities.  In the best case scenario, you have been around for many years and have had time to develop a solid reputation. Maybe then you extend your reach to 5 to 10% of your total market, leaving 90 to 95% to your competition.  In bigger markets, your percentage of reach is going to be much smaller.  Relying on Sphere of Influence marketing will never be a recipe for explosive growth.

 

As you can see, neither Google nor Sphere of Influence marketing provide true scalability.  If you can’t monopolize Google and you can’t find more hours in the day to become friends with all your potential customers, the vast majority of consumers in your market have no idea who you are or why they should do business with you.  Thus, The Small Business Ceiling is created.

​

BREAKING THROUGH THE CEILING

 

In future articles we’ll dig deeper into breaking out of The Small Business Ceiling, but for now we’ll start with a fairly simple and easy to understand solution.  To break the ceiling you must learn how to scale customer acquisition through an omni-present brand strategy designed to create close to 100% brand awareness in your market.  To state more simply; you must market everywhere, everyday until every current and future customer in your market knows exactly who you are and what you’re all about.

 

Every big business knows the importance of brand awareness. A quick review of their marketing practices will show that the most successful and smartest executives in the world believe in this to their core.  Companies spend billions every year on celebrity endorsements, television ads, stadium rights, brand initiatives and more.  Anything to ensure customers are familiar with their business and associate positively with their brand.

 

They do this because they know this is the ONLY way to achieve scalability.  Customers don’t buy Nike sneakers because a salesperson showed up at their house and told them all the benefits.  They don’t buy Apple phones because of a Google search for “phones near me”.  Customers buy them because they’ve built a relationship with the brand through years of non-stop marketing campaigns and incredible levels of brand awareness.

 

The classic objection to this line of thinking in small business is “we don’t have billions to spend on marketing like Nike does”.  This is absolutely true.  But you’re also not trying to sell to everyone in the world, rather, only to people in the 25 or 30 mile radius of potential customers around your business’s location.  Brand building in a 30-mile radius is ridiculously simple compared to what the biggest companies in the world have to do, and every one of you can do it.

 

So, it’s time for the entrepreneurs of America to get smart.  If you have a true desire to achieve explosive growth, it’s time to get serious about creating a brand strategy that scales your customer acquisition.  It’s not easy, and it’s not for the faint of heart.  But it is the only way to break through The Small Business Ceiling.