A, who has 10+ experience on running different businesses, once asked me: why businesses fail to grow? His answer is very simple.

The world is complicated

We always understate the complex of the world.

Remember when I was working in my old company I witnessed an exponential growth of a branch, from annual revenue of US$ 200k to over US$ 1 million within a year. We just established the Branch in Australia and the business was new to that market.

One of the reasons of this great success was that we had mature products and well- supportive a big team at our back, which brought confidence to customers. Even though we set extremely high prices, we managed to gain some large scale companies.

Of course they did see the positive impact from our products on their business, that’s why they were willing to continue the business relationship.

Simple answers might not be helpful

So back to the question: why businesses fail to grow. A told me that the main answer is that those businesses failed to come up with a growth plan. Most of the companies are willing to put more effort on fixing existing problems than to grow the businesses.

Similar things happened when we were at school – our teachers always told us to turn complicated things simple, just like this:

https://gradeup.co/basics-of-simplification-i-92fb579e-5006-11e6-875a-aa9887a810df

I agree with this answer, but I don’t think this is the main reason of businesses failing to grow.

For me, businesses are always so complicated that we can never find out a simple reason to explain everything. There are tons of factors affect businesses to grow. For example, are there a team of right people behind the scene supporting the businesses? are there top sales correctly selling our products? Are there keen competitions in the market which make business growth a lot difficult than in other markets?

Given that there are many reasons for this question, why A only gave me one answer?

Complex is bad? Let’s prioritise

Actually, I do understand why A is simplifying the answer for this question – it is the mode of thinking American always like to use. Most of them don’t like complexity and always simplify the situation, just like I could recall my previous CFO always told me to summarise the situation into 3 short points.

He is right that people don’t like complicated things. However, in reality, we WILL miss a lot of things if we simplify the situation, not only running businesses, but also living our own lives.

Therefore, for me, since there are a lot of answers for this question, I would try to prioritise different answers instead of simplifying the answer.

However, does it mean that we should avoid simplification? Let’s talk about it next time.

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If you want to know more about what I have learnt from other successful people, you can click the below link. This could the one of the life-changing articles for you:

Idea 018: Chit Chat v. Practical