Has Your Business Plateaued? 4 Reasons Bringing In A New Mind Can Help

Few things can become more discouraging for a budding entrepreneur than to feel like your business has plateaued. Whether sales have stagnated, customers are no longer as satisfied as they once were or you are lacking that sense of fulfillment from when you first started out, it’s perfectly normal for a business to plateau.

But that doesn’t mean it’s healthy — or that you should be okay with letting your business stay that way. Fortunately, as with so many other aspects of business, the right collaboration could be just what you need to push through this often frustrating stage. Welcoming a new mind into the mix can be a powerful solution for getting back into a growth stage.

1. Get A New Perspective

It can be difficult to truly understand the scope of the issues you’re dealing with when you are too close to the problem. Whether the underlying dilemma lies with one of your operational processes, your marketing and sales efforts or even your unique value proposition, it can be hard to pinpoint the issue yourself.

Outside perspectives can be critical in helping you evaluate your current operations from a new angle, uncovering issues or challenges that you might not have identified on your own. As a report from Maryville University notes, getting different perspectives can be crucial to escaping personal (and professional) echo chambers:

“While encountering perspectives that challenge one’s beliefs and way of seeing things can create discomfort, these experiences are critical to personal growth. An absence of such experiences can impede people’s ability to develop and learn. Bearing these sometimes uncomfortable moments can lead to curiosity and the maturation of one’s intellect. Not only that, the discoveries made when we engage with new and different perspectives can be exciting, inspiring, and enlightening.”

2. Outsource Your Work

On a more day-to-day level, bringing in new minds is often an important collaboration for smaller businesses, simply because they don’t have the necessary bandwidth to continue growing. This is especially true of solopreneurs.

A recent case study from PMU Launch, a beauty education company founded by Kyle Koschel and Renato Fabri, illustrates this concept well. Carina Moore, founder of Brows By Carina, had seen her B2B business’ revenue plateau at $1,200 per month for seven straight months. While initial efforts focused on strategic advertising and improving her sales calls played a key role in growing her revenue to $13,000 per month, that rapid growth created a secondary plateau, because she didn’t have the capacity to take on more work.

The next step was to begin working with other professionals as part of her team — an appointment-setter who would take care of inbound leads and appointments and an operations manager who would run the business’s day-to-day operations. By essentially outsourcing these tasks to other individuals, Carina was able to further increase her revenue to $29,000 per month, simply because she had more time to focus on strategic growth initiatives.

Outsourcing works.

3. Improve The Quality Of Your Work

Bringing in a new mind to help with your work — whether you are completely outsourcing a task to them or enlisting their help on a specific project — doesn’t just save time. It can also dramatically improve the quality of your work.

Research from Stanford University has found that working together actually helps “fuel intrinsic motivation,” with those who work in a collaborative setting being 50% more effective at completing tasks. Collaboration can also help make individual workers more engaged, which increases the overall quality of the work they perform.

Bringing in a new mind can further boost these benefits of collaboration because their unique perspective can help your team challenge existing processes and discover better solutions. A new collaborator’s industry insights or specific skill set can improve the quality of your products or services, while also helping you and your team learn from them to improve your own capabilities.

4. Increase Creativity And Innovation

Bringing in a new mind to help your plateaued business can be an incredibly powerful way to increase creativity and innovation. Diverse backgrounds and experiences are often what is needed to develop a solution that gets your business out of its current situation.

History is filled with examples of complete outsiders who helped spark creative breakthroughs in industries where they wouldn’t seem like a good fit. As Oguz A. Acar writes for California Management Review:

“While consulting an anthropologist for a molecular biology problem might seem far-fetched, many major breakthroughs in biology have actually originated from unexpected sources including anthropologists. This is often attributed to fresh perspectives of outsiders that might be novel for the problem domain. A case in point outside the field of biology is the Auto-Tune technology. Described as ‘the invention that changed music forever’, it was developed by a complete outsider to the music industry, a petroleum engineer named Harold Hildebrand.”

Creative ideas that you might never have considered can help push your business in new directions that get it past the plateau.

New Minds, New Growth

With the right collaborative partners, just about any business can work its way past a plateau and put itself back on track for achieving its most meaningful goals.

By focusing on collaborations that improve your productivity and work quality, while also bringing in new perspectives to help you uncover issues and develop creative solutions, you can unlock the full potential of new minds in your business.