The 38 Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face

Growing a business is complicated. According to SBE Council, 89% of all businesses employ fewer than 20 employees. And scaling a company further is contingent on solving a number of business challenges — most of those being common across all organizations out there.

Businesses in their first year or two, under 10 to 20 employees, and making less than $500,000 in revenue are still validating their business model. Once a certain sense of stability is met, several repetitive challenges keep haunting organizations, over and over again.

This is why I’ve compiled this comprehensive list of the most impactful business challenges that companies have to deal with. Resembling the feast or famine cycle freelancers are notorious for, the balancing act requires juggling with multiple challenges at a time, often across different categories.

And in addition to the current spectrum of the ecosystem, keep yourself up to speed with the best business strategy books.

For easier navigation, here’s a table of contents you can refer to for every section in this long-form guide:

The list is broken down into 6 core categories, each of them describing a painful challenge growing organizations struggle with throughout their growth journey.

1. Business Strategy

The Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face | Business Strategy Challenges

Equally valid for small enterprises and large corporations, staying ahead of the game is fine art for any organization out there.

Risk too much and you’re running at loss. Remain comfortable in your position and competition will steal your most valued customers. Defining an effective business strategy that can scale and evolve with time is paramount for a profitable venture eager to stay ahead.

1.1. Designing Systems and Processes

Business process management, as defined in Wikipedia, is the discipline responsible for applying techniques and methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes.

Aside from professional consultancies, BPM is a leading challenge across growing organizations. Processes evolve over time as the business penetrates new markets and hires employees.

New recruits affect the company’s hierarchy, often leading to new tiers of management, operational procedures, and management workflows.

While the requirement for in-depth MBA understanding is evident, mainstream education is not the only way, as it may be confusing and expensive for some people, Luckily, people like Josh Kaufman provide concise books like The Personal MBA where they touch on systems and processes in entrepreneurship and traditional business.

An ineffective set of processes will impact in-house and external communication, the company’s morale, the efficiency of hiring new people at scale, and the profitability across the onboarding of new roles.

1.2. Lack of Direction/Vision

Organizations clearly threaten companies wandering around without a long-term vision with a clear agenda in place.

Kodak passed on the opportunity to release the first digital camera. They felt secure in their photography world while neglecting the drawbacks of traditional cameras in the era of evolving digital innovations.

Toys R Us faded away for good while millennials and generation Z embraced video games and online shopping. Smaller stores sold the same products at a discounted price, in neighborhoods all around the world.

Even billion-dollar enterprises can easily drop out of a competitive landscape unless they keep innovating, attracting new markets, and staying on top of the latest innovations.

Executives and senior managers can leverage the power of SWOT analysis frameworks and identify the missing links in their leadership strategy. This could be instrumental as an exercise for team leaders and even individual employees across the organization as a “reality check” instrument for self-assessment.

1.3. Coping With Market Competition

An old branding rule states that the best businesses are:

  • The first in a category
  • Or the best in a category

Younger startups fail to define their unique competitive advantage among established giants. Industry leaders, on the other end, miss stealth startups rapidly aiming at their target market, revealing their weaknesses, and coming up with a counter-offer.

A smart workaround is targeting foreign markets for higher profit margins. Acquiring the majority of a market in a less competitive area can generate enough buzz to bootstrap the business in “red ocean” territories harder to penetrate at first.

One of my favourite reading materials regarding market competition is Alex Hormozi’s $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers to Want to Buy Your Stuff. The book is full of actionable frameworks and hook-and-retain systems that help you land more customers. I have two physical copies of the book in the DevriX office.

Differentiating while niching down is a common strategy for starting businesses that want to overcome the challenges of a broad pool of successful vendors in the space.

1.4. Keeping Up With Market Transformations

Adapting to market transformations and technological innovations isn’t easy at scale.

US companies with hundreds of employees abandoned EU markets after the introduction of GDPR in May 2018. Old-school businesses who couldn’t train their staff basic computer operator skills struggle to operate in a competitive digital environment. The same legal framework is now penetrating the US, causing friction and problems for smaller businesses.

Advertising in newspapers and social media is a different game. Just like adapting a traditional “car salesman” process to a modern business development workflow given a transformed buyer’s journey.

Being “up to speed” with the latest business, digital, economic and political trends isn’t easy. We may be following the industry journals, but groundbreaking innovations are deployed quietly, emerging globally once they get enough traction for scale.

1.5. Reducing Dependencies On The Founding Team

A common problem for startups and smaller businesses where founders are heavily involved in day-to-day operations.

Smart founders are aware of the benefits of working “on” the business instead of “in” the business. But implementing this in practice is complicated.

If founders want the business to be more independent of them, they must create a business parable for their start-ups that won’t trap them when they want to sell it.

Inefficient execution leads to blockers and broken workflows, swamping the founding team, delaying deliverables, capping growth, and reducing the level of institutional knowledge in the team.

Designing a recruitment and growth strategy around building a leadership team of intrapreneurs is a lesser-known solution to this common business challenge.

1.6. Balancing Quality And Growth

Growing startups and SMEs often report reduced quality while scaling, especially the fast-growth ones.

During the first year or two, a small handful of people are in charge of all operations. Skilled professionals start a business, deliver outstanding quality, work day and night on execution, and build a client base.

To become a high-performing SME, founders develop clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence, and demonstrate courage.

Throughout the growth period, new roles are created — support, business development, marketing, management. As recruitment and onboarding processes are still in their infancy, this creates a separation between the level of quality across different team members.

Moreover, hiring A-players isn’t sustainable at scale. A large corporation can only survive with a complex set of repetitive workflows, easy to follow by anyone who jumps on board. Relying on creativity, self-management, and proactivity is risky and nearly impossible for multinational enterprises.

1.7. Leveraging Consultants and Business Advisors

Athletes work with coaches, musicians rely on producers to advise on trends, enterprises work under boards.

The equivalent of scaling a business effectively for small and medium-sized enterprises are consultants and advisors.

Finding a business mentor is one of the most productive tips that Suhail, founder of a 300+ person Mixpanel, suggests:

Efficiency at scale is paramount. Mistakes cost a fortune, time is of the essence, allocating time often involves multiple divisions. Even with a small army in your control, assigning the right strategic activities is far easier when you work with a digital or business consultant.

2. Marketing

The Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face | Marketing Challenges

Marketing is a blended term encompassing a broad set of professional activities. It’s not a necessity for tiny teams.

Growing further? It’s absolutely paramount.

Here are the main marketing challenges that businesses face while growing.

2.1. Building Effective Marketing Strategies

What is the #1 problem with generic terms like “Marketing”, “Negotiations”, “Management”?

Everyone assumes they get the gist out of them.

You don’t have to be certified or spend 4 years in a college to manage a couple of people. But managing two people in an SMB is completely different than managing a team of top-tier engineers in Google, for example.

Organizations often rely on rumors and common trends online, including:

  • Blogs are mandatory for success
  • An omni-channel approach from the start is required
  • You should spend a lot of time on social media
  • Video will rule
  • Marketing transforms to AI

The lack of any strategy in place, setting up adequate key performance indicators, and producing actionable business results are major bottlenecks for many businesses, especially traditional ones.

To produce such results, one must learn to create simple and fast marketing strategies. They might not be perfect, but a working viable strategy is better than nothing.

Making the first step to refining your marketing strategy is important. Don’t miss out.

2.2. Properly Allocating Marketing Resources

Investing in marketing isn’t intuitive at first. There are plenty of options for launching marketing initiatives:

  • Hiring a marketing co-founder
  • Onboarding a director of marketing
  • Starting with an assistant or two
  • Working with freelancers
  • Signing with an agency

Businesses in different stages can apply marketing in various forms. Without the right strategy in place, marketing will be chaotic, generating minimum (if any) ROI, and more expensive than useful.

And exploring the alternatives between outsourcing or building marketing teams is the best next step.

2.3. Measuring Marketing Initiatives

Setting up the right KPIs (key performance indicators) is an art.

The most common response I get while chatting with clients regarding KPIs is “revenue“.

Of course, revenue growth is the ultimate goal for almost any business. But, it is achievable through multiple channels. Each represents a chain of techniques and events leading to a sale or a conversion.

The lack of direction — and the vagueness of a strategy — won’t lead to a tight process, a measurable one that gets the job done.

This is why one important content marketing lesson is that professional marketers must outline a successful content strategy that is broken down into multiple phases, over time, with certain indicators in place. Traffic, conversion rates, sign-ups, email open rates, brand searches — and hundreds of other factors contributing to generating a purchase.

2.4. Building a Corporate Brand

A powerful brand can go a very, very long way.

Most reputable and well-known brands in the world can afford to:

  1. Receive tons of PR attention
  2. Get thousands of job applications at no cost
  3. Present at the best events out there
  4. Land customers with little friction
  5. Receive free backlinks (being quoted and pointed as an example all the time)
  6. Rank high in Google as a result
  7. Gather a loyal, enormous group of followers online

Brand building is a complex, long-term initiative, and measuring results isn’t easy. But the effects of a powerful brand are indisputable.

Employer branding is an extremely powerful weapon for recruitment, especially at rapidly growing organizations.

The return on investment in brand building for large corporations is the leading reason hundreds of millions are poured into street billboards and TV ads. Believe it or not, it pays off with time.

2.5. Relying On Marketing For Lead Generation

As discussed a bit earlier, defining optimal strategies and measuring KPIs is complex. As a result, businesses know that marketing is essential — but they remain unsure of its efficiency.

They can’t predictably hire and grow revenue thanks to marketing initiatives.

They can’t retain or generate new leads.

They can’t scale budgets sustainably due to fluctuating results.

And this impacts their sales and business development processes as a result. This stagnation reflects on revenue growth, salary increments, and employees’ mental health at the workplace.

Successful businesses have the right processes in place, measure KPIs related to actual purchases, and can pump up additional resources to predictably increase their revenue.

3. Recruitment

The Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face | Recruitment Challenges

Starting businesses care a lot more and more frequently about landing new customers. Once they build a small team and form a couple of recurring revenue streams, scaling the company becomes a bigger challenge.

And what are the main recruitment hassles businesses complain about?

3.1. Hiring New Employees

You’ve closed a strategic partnership or closed a massive deal — but you lack the manpower to execute. How quickly can you scale the team?

Unless your brand speaks for itself or your budgets are through the roof, competing with everyone on the market for top talent is a shark pool.

Top talent can start anywhere. They get the perks, the salary package, probably some flexible time off or remote working opportunities, along with a nice title and some growth opportunities. Top national brands and bleeding-edge startups both compete for them, with tens of thousands of open jobs online.

Hiring at scale is even more challenging. The overhead is multiplied if you need to make compromises in a really competitive market.

Following the practical guide to hiring employees will overcome some of the leading obstacles for you.

3.2. Founding New Departments

When I discuss business process outsourcing with prospects or potential partners, hiring in-house always comes up. And my response to this is:

Are you ready to build and nurture an entire new department?

This is equally valid for production, development, marketing, and logistics.

With marketing, getting the job done is contingent on strategy and leadership, combined with a team of top performers across different disciplines (copywriting, social media, email marketing, etc.)

In web development, building a project, unless they are great insta pages, requires front-end and back-end developers, quality assurance experts, tech-savvy project managers, systems engineers, and creative artists.

Starting a new department is a challenging undertaking that is to be evaluated carefully and incorporated with regular and reliable feedback plans.

This is especially important if you’re bootstrapped and building a new department with a limited budget until generating positive ROI.

3.3. Retaining Top Talent

Arranging an interview with top talent isn’t easy. Getting them to accept an offer is a form of luck.

Retaining them? Even the largest brands struggle to retain talent. In competitive disciplines like software engineering,

Facebook’s average retention period is 2.5 years while Google’s is 3.2 years. Complying with the most common recruitment challenges in IT will mitigate a portion of the churn rate.

With all the perks and top-tier salaries, exciting projects, and businesses worth hundreds of billions, keeping talent around is still a leading risk across business organizations.

3.4. Embracing Diversity At Work

Diversity has been a painful topic for ages. It has gained a lot more attention during the past decade, with some groundbreaking revelations for pay cuts, sexual harassment, unlawful firing, gender or racial discrimination (to name a few).

Companies like Uber have sunk billions in valuation due to poor management and reputation on the grounds of diversity.

Making sure that the culture is thriving is one of the leading problems. And enriching the workspace without placing artificial constraints is a natural continuation.

3.5. Nurturing a Thriving Company Culture

Building a great culture is a compound process that covers every step of the way:

  1. Strategy and core leadership
  2. Definition of the culture’s goals
  3. Careful and thorough recruitment
  4. Appropriate and balanced onboarding workflow
  5. Integration within existing processes and teams
  6. Ongoing nurturing and mentorship
  7. Giving freedom and opportunities
  8. Personal and professional development across talent

At DevriX, we’ve been mastering the culture development process since day 1. Company culture is the leading factor for building a successful remote team.

While a time-consuming endeavor, neglecting talent will decrease retention rates and the overall efficiency within the organization.

4. Management

The Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face | Steps for building a great culture

Management takes multiple forms in a business organization. It entails the control and coordination of processes, people, time, resources, vendors, budgets, and a broader area of activities across the company.

Along with business strategy in the first chapter, management touches every point of the organization. And some of the key managerial problems businesses face are enumerated in this section.

4.1. Time Management

Effectively allocating time to the right initiatives is a craft.

And this is a valid problem for virtually every industry. Regardless of whether you run a cab company, a software agency, an event management consultancy, or a law firm.

Productive time management maximizes the potential of every single employee. Within a team, the power law kicks in: two slow parties will exponentially drag an assignment further and incur communication overhead.

This entails the time of the founders, senior management, supervisors, and every end unit of the business.

4.2. Working ON The Business

This is closely related to the dependency of the founding team.

Business owners and the C-Suite should quickly transition from operations to strategic leadership as the team grows.

At first, owners must run the day-to-day of the business.

They set the tone and create the initial processes. Bring the actual value to the business by delivering results. Building the product or delivering the service.

It’s only natural — and this is what freelancers and consultants do for the better part of their careers.

But scaling a company and hiring people? Delegation and freeing up time on strategy and growth are paramount. This is where building partnerships and outsourcing come in handy. A business cannot scale if the founders work in the business instead of determining and setting the direction for the entire organization.

4.3. Communication

A communication study reported by the Society for HR Management includes 400 companies with 100,000 employees each. Inadequate communication incurs an average of $62.4M in loss caused by overhead, misaligned work, incorrect deliverables, and more.

Communication problems easily make it to the top 10 critical business challenges across all organizations.

Many decision-makers seem to be incapable of connecting with their team and being on the same page.

And there are so many contributing factors: lack of enough experience, vague requirements, fear of disappointing management (or losing one’s job), ego, poor processes.

Establishing a streamlined communication protocol and straightforward processes is what management consulting and operational management are all about.

4.4. Motivating Employees

A critical challenge for both startups and large corporations.

An inefficient, demotivated employee in a startup may be worth 20% of the entire manpower of the firm. This may very well cause the startup to go bankrupt. Luckily, small teams work closely together every day and noticing the trend is easier than overseeing tens of thousands of employees.

The challenge for large corporations is the law of power. If multiple departments get disconnected from the general purpose of the business, this may result in hundreds of employees investing the bare minimum to stay employed. And the combined expenses for the corporation are staggering — let alone the missed opportunities from closing new business.

Whenever capital isn’t there, creative recruitment and management techniques are available for startups and smaller enterprises.

4.5. Strategic Leadership

The role of strategic leadership is defining the right roadmap for the business (or a department), breaking it down into actionable items, delegating the goals to the responsible parties, uniting the team together, motivating each member, and moving the needle both short-term and in the long run.

Strategic leadership touches on other important aspects of management. It covers the business needs through ideation and execution, envisioning trends and seeking opportunities.

It also respects each team member, recognizing valuable skills and developing new opportunities for growth.

Effective leadership improves company morale and progressively moves the business forward.

4.6. Hybrid Work

The “new normal” since the beginning of 2020 changed a lot of paradigms, including the global shift to remote work, working across different time zones, and hiring internationally (to name a few). It looks different now in 2023 with most people back at the office – but still a leading remote or hybrid-first environment and multinational organizations at scale.

While global managers grew into their new role of managing remote talent, the new transition to hybrid work poses its own challenges.

Introducing new tooling to facilitate asynchronous communication across teams enabled better time allocation in-between Zoom calls and Slack/Teams huddles. And establishing a better workflow that strengthens on-site meetings with inclusivity toward remote employees is the next step.

4.7. Limited Focus Mode

According to different studies, managers spend nearly 20 hours a week in meetings. Blocking time for focus work is challenging.

How to increase productivity while maintaining collaboration across teams?

One way to combat meetings fatigue is by mastering multitasking. Understanding how and when to focus matters – but being a master in multitasking carries its own weight.

Additionally, fighting procrastination will help you and your teams build resilience on the job.

5. Sales

Sales are a necessity to fuel the corporate engine.

A successful sales strategy unlocks growth opportunities across all business departments — hiring new team members, investing in brand building, training for current employees, raises and bonuses, and a safety net if something goes off.

Here are the most pressing sales challenges for most businesses out there.

5.1. Landing New Business

Every business struggles with closing new customers (small and large alike). Even enterprises have to compete for large government contracts.

Startups haven’t proven themselves yet, lack a fully trained sales team on-site, and need to compete with large, well-known organizations. Especially true if the founder has no sales expertise.

Enterprises are expensive. Their operational costs are high which affects their price point. Also, most enterprises can’t innovate fast enough, allowing competitors to chime in or startups to launch, acquiring some of their existing users.

Even when an established sales process is in place, the landscape of the market evolves at a fast pace. Consumers get access to new opportunities (or competitors). Some profitable channels get oversaturated. Retaining top salespeople is expensive and eats up the business margins.

Here’s the starter guide to generating sales designed for covering the basic techniques for introvert founders and CEOs.

5.2. Retaining Customers (Lifetime Value)

Since sales and marketing get more expensive, retaining existing customers is the focus of SaaS businesses, service companies, support firms, and any other business able to continuously deliver to the same customer.

Customer retention can be disrupted with a drop in the quality, increase of prices, the inception of more lucrative competitors.

And many businesses simply haven’t found effective channels to keep customers happy (and willing to pay) continuously. Luckily, different techniques are available for continuously prolonging the lifetime value per customer.

5.3. Maximizing Word of Mouth

The Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face | The power of well-known brands

Similarly to customer retention, unlocking new sales opportunities from satisfied customers is a common problem for businesses.

Companies traditionally don’t have an effective process for receiving introductions to other leads or invitations to special industry events.

This can be supplemented with case studies, video reviews, and testimonials increasing the credibility of a business.

According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust word of mouth more than any other form of advertising. Maximizing this channel is worth conceptualizing.

5.4. Identifying New Sales Channels

Most small and medium businesses leverage one or two sales channels. These are usually insufficient and risky.

On top of that, they may be expensive. Attending trade shows for closing a couple of leads requires a lot of preparation, travel, and accommodation, and building a team capable of closing.

Over time, new sales channels emerge. Are you actively seeking them?

The same goes for regularly experimenting with channels that didn’t work back in the day.

If cold calling wasn’t efficient a year ago, it may work better now. A new hire may be more competent in reaching out through LinkedIn. Your brand may have contributed to the better positioning of your business, contingent on having the right offer to pitch.

5.5. Handling Pricing Negotiations

Even the most experienced salesmen often struggle with price haggling.

While you know what your product is worth, this doesn’t necessarily translate into your prospect’s mind.

With new competition on board and innovative ways to solve existing business problems, retaining the value of your solution isn’t easy. Lucrative potential partnerships may justify reducing the cost in some cases, but identifying the right partnership opportunities requires a good amount of experience and predicting the corresponding opportunities.

5.6. Building Strategic Partnerships & Networking

One of the easiest ways to bootstrap a new business or launch a brand new product is leveraging partnerships (and networking with the right vendors).

Partnerships are one of the four most important lead generation channels for both of my businesses. Starting a meaningful collaboration with an existing business that serves the same audience can be an incredible win-win for both parties: you reach your ideal audience and your partner can upsell or cross-sell their services.

Marketplaces are an intermediate medium that gets the job done. But a real partnership enables you to run joint webinars, leverage press together, and maximize ad spend effectively.

And when it comes to effective networking, here’s what you need to know.

6. Technology

Technology sits at the intersection of management and operations.

Businesses of all types and forms deploy software solutions for online positioning, marketing automation, customer relationship management, resource planning, application tracking, project management (to name a few).

Understanding how and when technology can increase the productivity of the business is a key skill.

6.1. Solving Productivity Problems

Productivity loss is a combination of inefficient processes, poor tracking, communication overhead, incomplete onboarding.

All of these challenges can be solved with the right technology stack in place. Here’s how to do it.

  • Processes can be optimized with business process management solutions, carefully refining your set of processes, delegating each step to a team member, and tracking progress over time.
  • Tracking and project management may be handled with PM systems, a team messenger application, and time trackers whenever applicable.
  • Onboarding may be handled through documentation or online courses, email training, demo applications, and virtual conferencing whenever external consultants are involved.
  • Leverage tools for multitasking and asynchronous communication

Repetitively solving productivity problems will have an accumulative positive impact on business growth (and company morale).

6.2. Automating Business Processes

Day-to-day operations can always be optimized. Reducing administrative friction is a “best practice” when creating a business plan for the company or a new product.

Back in the day, logistic companies weren’t leveraging GPS devices and tracking software optimizing their routes throughout the day. They used to fill out waybills on paper, using a finite set of receipt numbers, carrying over to accounting which spent days to merge these before the end of the month.

Accounting used to be handled on paper, by hand. Sales presentations are led over the phone or on-site due to the lack of video conferencing and presentations.

Eventually, new technical solutions emerged, solving day-to-day processes, reducing the error rate of manual mistakes, simplifying calculations, and designing predictions.

6.3. Deploying Technology For Innovation

Even when tools are available, deploying them at work may turn out to be a complex set of processes.

Growing organizations use dozens (if not hundreds) of software tools responsible for different activities, aiming to maximize the use of incorporating technology to solve business problems. Effective applications talk to each other, pulling data from financial software tools, cross-checking with marketing applications, and generating reports in ERPs or CRMs.

Finding the right technical stack may be tricky. Evaluating the return on investment for restructuring certain portions of the technical landscape in favor of improving processes and saving time is an ongoing challenge for information officers and business leaders.

6.4. Training Staff At Large

Aside from the technical logistics, teaching employees new software applications is an expensive investment.

While the younger generation is more comfortable switching between applications (thanks to the adoption of laptops, tablets, smartphones), that’s not the case for everyone, especially for the older generation.

This is why training may take weeks, months, or even over a year for complex ERPs or other business process applications delivering tens of thousands of features.

Considering the adoption of a software solution is always top of mind for business leaders looking for ways to optimize processes and reduce the hiring overhead for operations that could easily be automated (at least partially).

6.5. Keeping Up to Speed With Innovations

The Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face | Rumors and common trends online

Due to the challenges of deploying new software, organizations often get too comfortable using outdated tools or applications.

This creates a false sense of “efficiency“. A software application is in place and some of the work gets done. Oftentimes, this is not the most optimal way forward.

Moreover, identifying the right technical solutions to deploy is questionable. Organizations with limited tech-savvy leaders may miss out on great opportunities. Or get mislead by expensive PR and advertising campaigns started by less promising market alternatives.

One of the leading reasons we deploy WordPress solutions to enterprises is the bulletproof backward compatibility. Ensuring the longevity of your software solution will improve the adoption and decrease the documentation overhead for every new release.

Missing out on key opportunities may degrade the efficiency of the organization and impact the work quality as a result. Tech-driven businesses relying on the latest tech may deliver similar results at a fraction of the cost or time.

7. Compliance

The fastest way to tank a successful company at scale is a massive legal or financial violation.

Failing to report taxes accurately, especially internationally, or violating human laws can turn into an absolute nightmare for every organization.

7.1. Tax Management

Starting businesses are not as prone to regular audits. Doing business at a small scale is considered less risky, involves fewer employees, doesn’t include syndicates or lobbies.

Handing taxes becomes a burden early in – and complying with federal, state, national, and international tax regulations is a notable challenge.

Digital companies adhere to different tax codes depending on whether they deliver services or products, the origin of the deal, selling to individuals vs. companies, and their geographical location. That creates a number of edge cases that commerce software needs to support and keep up to date with as taxes change over time.

7.2. GDPR/CCPA

Privacy laws and regulations have contributed to legal overhead and digital popup blindness ever since the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, followed by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018.

While privacy policies have always been important, strictly limiting sensitive and personally identifiable information is on the rise. Following violations can cost 10 million euros (around $11M) or 2% of the global turnover of an organization. For context, Amazon was fined $877M in 2021and Facebook $275M.

7.3. Employment Overhead

Growing businesses depend on collaboration. Headcount is directly proportional to revenue growth and success – as scaling operations is nearly impossible without continuous hiring.

But employment laws aren’t easy, either. There are continued conflicts between applicants and organizations, involving labor laws and authorities. Between demand for public salary ranges and diversity conversations, parenting leave demands, increasing age for retirement, mandatory annual leave, and providing a healthy environment at work, HR managers and executives have to navigate a complex set of requirements.

This also facilitates an easier onboarding environment for freelancers, contractors, and agencies, further growing the entrepreneurial space out there.


What’s Next?

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be supplementing the list with additional business challenges companies face across other growth areas, including sales, management, technology, and finances.

And most topics will receive an in-depth overview of techniques and leading industry practices.

If you are interested in the evolution of the comprehensive business checklist covering the leading challenges haunting growing businesses, make sure you sign up for my free 8-week business training.

Over the course of 16 lessons, I’ll discuss the most pressing business challenges, structured in an easy-to-follow way for executives and managers operating in different industries.

This is suitable management training for aspiring leaders in your organization as well.

37 thoughts on “The 38 Biggest Business Challenges Growing Companies Face”

  1. Iris Black says: July 17, 2019 at 2:11 pm

    Excellent article Mario! Very comprehensive. You’re spot on regarding your point about market transformations. With so many aspects to consider, it’s certainly a task to keep up with every change. Another major challenge I’ve seen companies facing is adhering to all the compliance protocols. Many businesses have trouble staying on the right side of the law and avoiding major potential future issues.

  2. Mario says: July 17, 2019 at 2:22 pm

    Thanks, Iris!

    Legal is one of the aspects I’d like to talk about as well. But due to the complex, ever-changing legislation in different countries, this may backfire. That’s why I’m trying to cover some of the broader areas that overlap between industries.

  3. Lennox says: September 6, 2020 at 6:39 am

    Amazing content here – so clear and concise

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *