At some point during your career as an entrepreneur, you’ll hit a stunt in growth and think “what’s next?” It’s not uncommon for this plateau to happen suddenly, and it’s not the end of your career. For most, this realization can be devastating, but it’s the perfect opportunity to set new goals, come up with new strategies, and change your mindset. Entrepreneurs tend to live by a mentality that they either grow or fail––plateauing being a point of no return. 

Here’s what happens when your business reaches a standstill, and what to do about it. 

#1: Your Business Strategy Is Flawed

Before you started your business, you had a master business strategy planned out to give yourself an idea of how you wanted things to work. Now, however, you might find that business strategy is outdated, and find yourself improvising on the spot. It’s not that your business strategy stopped working—it did its job. It just might not work for this new phase of business. 

The older version of you and your business needed that temporary, now-outdated solution, but the newer versions need a new solution. You can find it. 

#2: Laziness Is Kicking In

It’s absurd to think you can execute the same strategy or technique for the rest of your life and not hit a plateau. If you aren’t getting the results you want, or you find your business stagnating, it may be time to rethink your efforts. Most people have a natural aversion to change, so you might find yourself thinking that you’re fine where you’re at. You may be completely unaware that change is necessary, but hitting a plateau is a pretty good sign that it is. 

In order to reverse this cycle of laziness, it’s important to restore the passion you once had for your business. Take a leap outside of your comfort zone, set bigger goals, and commit to being an entrepreneur. 

#3: You Need to Shift Your Mindset

If you or your business lives month-to-month, you’re probably all to familiar familiar with stress and that feeling of excess weight on your shoulders. As the numbers in your bank account get lower and lower, you enter into survival mode; scrounging up just enough loose change to make it to your paycheck. As soon as your paycheck hits your account, you feel relieved and stop hustling to make ends meet. 

With this relief comes a lack of motivation to reach beyond yourself to save and make more money. Unfortunately, this cycle turns into an infinite loop of barely scraping by with no incentive to change. This mindset creates a vicious cycle and ends up stunting your growth. 

Eventually, you’ll get to a point where you won’t be as desperate or as stressed about your journey as an entrepreneur. Once you reach a good point in your career, you won’t feel such a sense of urgency to keep your business afloat. Until you get to this point, you will need to shift your mindset.

What Do You Need to Change? 

A few things need to change to help you embrace your entrepreneurial plateau. The first is your mindset. When you want a mindset shift, you need to make a list of things that will encourage growth, and then give yourself at least 90 days to complete that list. 

Second, you need to rethink your current business strategy. Just because it worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s going to work now. Try to come up with a new strategy that will help you find new solutions. 

The last piece of advice we can offer is to recommit yourself to your business, vision, and goals. Setting attainable goals takes the pressure off of you and is much more doable in a shorter amount of time. Our goals should be set so they are just out of our grasp, to challenge us to work harder and grow, but not so far out of reach that we grow discouraged and quit. 

A plateau isn’t the end for your business, it just means that you may need to tweak or adjust old strategies to yield better results. Challenging yourself will put you in the right position to create new strategies, cultivate a better mindset, and commit to your business in ways you’ve never done before.