Unlocking Growth: Five Internal Constraints Holding Businesses Back

By Jeff Andrews
Founder and Principal
Red Dog Advisors

Running a business in today’s environment is tough. Growing one is even tougher. Constantly changing economic conditions, shifting customer expectations, increasing competition, and rapid changes in technology have all made sustained growth more complex and more elusive than ever before. For dealer and supplier businesses in particular, growth doesn’t just depend on selling more products. It requires strategic clarity, operational efficiency and the ability to adapt quickly.

As a growth advisory consultant who helps businesses from small startups to billion-dollar enterprises scale up their operations, I’ve seen firsthand how various factors drive real growth and what can hold organizations back. While external influences such as economic conditions, tariffs, interest rates, and restaurant industry cycles certainly impact growth, many barriers are internal. And unlike the broader economy, these internal constraints are well within your control.

This article outlines five of the most common — and solvable — constraints that limit growth in distribution and manufacturing businesses and it covers practical steps companies may take to overcome each type of barrier.

Growth Constraint One: Missing or Incomplete Strategies

Most businesses have some version of a strategy but it’s often too basic, is outdated or has significant gaps. These issues are mostly caused by a lack of expertise or knowledge in key growth strategy areas. Some businesses unfortunately believe they’re “too small” to need defined strategies.

In my experience, 15 specific strategies are essential for growth. These include common ones like target market definition, sales and distribution and lead generation. Where I frequently see critical gaps are in the more advanced strategies that include market positioning, customer experience, technology, and data management. The foundations of growth emanate from your team being well aligned on all 15 strategies. If your team isn’t aligned, execution and growth suffer.

That was the experience of one of my clients, who had defined sales targets and a product strategy, but were lacking in the rest of those 15 foundational strategies. We began by focusing on five missing strategies that were having the most impact on execution: targeting, positioning, lead generation, people (roles and compensation), and data management. Once these were defined and communicated, execution became more precise, aligned and consistent.

What you can do: Take an inventory of your strategies. What’s missing? What’s outdated? Create strategies for any gaps. Talk with your leadership team to see how well your strategies are understood. You don’t need lengthy documents, just enough clarity to align your teams and enable consistent execution.

Growth Constraint Two: Low Digital Maturity

Digital maturity relates to the knowledge and use of technology for the purpose of improving performance, streamlining operations and increasing profits. It influences every area of your business. However, your company’s digital maturity isn’t just a reflection of the technology it’s selected. It’s a function of your business’ technology, processes, people, data, knowledge, and adoption.

According to research from Gartner, 70 percent of enterprise resource planning (ERP) deployments fail to meet the defined objectives. From my work advising other businesses on their technology implementations, it’s clear these failures are frequently due to poor alignment with business strategies, lack of planning and low digital maturity.

Take, for instance, a mid-sized distributor I worked with on an ERP implementation. Many of the company’s team members struggled with the new capabilities the ERP offered, such as report building analytical tools, billing automation, and overall process automation. The root issue quickly became clear: the distributor had always relied on its IT team to understand its systems, build reports, manage data, and recommend process changes. When the company’s IT leader left, so did nearly all of its digital maturity. To avoid repeating this risk, we built a training and upskilling plan for each functional leader, aligned with the technological capabilities relevant to their role.

What you can do: Recognize that technology alone doesn’t create growth; rather, it amplifies momentum. Before making significant investments in technology, clarify your strategies. Then focus on raising digital maturity in the people and areas where it will most accelerate growth.

Growth Constraint Three: Lack of Real-Time Visibility

Too many businesses still rely on spreadsheets or manually assembled reports that are outdated by the time they’re reviewed. Sometimes companies have a hard time consistently driving growth if they can’t quickly monitor key metrics and answer questions like: Which sales channels are most profitable? Which products and product categories have the highest velocity? What should we promote to each customer based on our sales history?

Results and key metrics evolve and change. Without the ability to monitor performance in real time, businesses are unable to adapt and optimize. Nearly every client I’ve worked with has had some degree of limited visibility. I’ve found the best first step is always to define key metrics and ensure a data management strategy exists. From there, we build those metrics into reports and dashboards — either within the ERP or in a business intelligence tool — to provide real-time visibility across the business.

What you can do: Identify the three most important growth metrics for each operational area in your business. Then, determine if your current systems can deliver these metrics in real time. If not, it’s time to consider better analytics tools or new ERP capabilities.

Growth Constraint Four: Delayed Decision-Making

Twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to complete an abbreviated Army Ranger training program. A key factor in the success of training missions depended on the platoon leader’s ability to make decisions. To this day, I can envision ranger trainers shouting “Whatcha gonna do, PL?” as they pushed us to make decisions with limited intelligence. The experience taught me the importance of moving forward even if circumstances aren’t ideal or information is incomplete. If growth requires forward motion, then decisions are the spark that sets things in motion.

Some business leaders struggle with the decision-making aspect of running a company. They delay decisions that involve change, risk or investment as they wait for perfect conditions that rarely arrive. This indecision slows innovation and causes teams to lose direction and momentum. Critical initiatives get stuck in limbo, which allows competitors to gain market share or to outpace their business in customer experience, technology or talent acquisition. Operational inefficiencies grow if outdated systems or processes aren’t addressed in a timely manner. Ultimately, growth and financial performance suffer. Additionally, frequent delays of key decisions are often a sign of unclear strategies or a fear of failure.

Decision-making hesitancy has been a key challenge for one company I’ve worked with over the past three years. The business’ leaders tended to have anxiety over making an imperfect decision, often leading them to postpone action in favor of “thinking about it,” gathering more information or tweaking a process first. By the time they were ready to move forward, someone essential to the process had inevitably left the company or changed roles, causing the entire cycle to start over again.

To break this pattern, I helped the executive team to weigh costs, risks and benefits more quickly — and to become more comfortable making a decision with imperfect information. We also reinforced the mindset that learning from action is often more valuable than waiting for certainty. Since then, their confidence has grown, and with it, the pace of execution.

What you can do: Use your growth strategies to prioritize decisions, with a focus on those that will have the greatest impact. Set deadlines to avoid lingering choices. If needed, consider having an accountability partner to ensure you make timely decisions.

Growth Constraint Five: Lack of Intentionality

Intentionality is being deliberate and purposeful with your time, thoughts and actions. It means having a desired future state or outcome in mind and committing what’s needed to see it through.

In today’s reactive business environment, most leaders are constantly “doing” without pausing to reflect. Once they’ve had success, it’s natural to continue functioning the same way and with the same mindset. Habits and routines take over, driving nearly all thoughts and actions, often at the expense of higher-value thinking. That might keep the day-to-day operation going, but it can come at the expense of the overall business. Without intentional time to assess strategies, systems, people, and opportunities, constraints go unaddressed and growth often stalls.

Lack of intentionality is commonly rooted in unclear purpose, undefined strategy and insufficient focus. I’m reminded of one company that was caught up in putting out daily fires, leaving it with little time to define strategic priorities. The result was poor accountability throughout its organization and little sense of the goals everyone was supposed to be working toward.

To shift the business back toward intentionality, we started dedicating time for the leadership team to engage in strategic planning and deep thinking. We held a meeting offsite to reset the company’s purpose and define key elements of its business strategy. Next, we implemented quarterly cross-functional reviews to keep focus on long-term priorities and encouraged individual leaders to block time each week for reflection and forward-looking planning. With those elements in place, the company was able to not only reignite its growth, but it also did a better job at managing the daily challenges that previously consumed so much of its focus.

What you can do: Be intentional and disciplined with how you spend your time. Block space in your calendar for deep thinking. Revisit your strategies with your leadership team. Assess what’s working and what isn’t.

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As Jim Collins, business researcher and keynote speaker for the 2025 FEDA Annual Executive Leadership Conference, writes in his best-selling book Good to Great, “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”

As you consider your business and these five common growth constraints, ask yourself and your leadership team the following questions:

• Have we clearly identified our key constraints to growth?
• Are our strategies defined, shared and understood?
• Is our digital maturity enabling or hindering growth?
• Do we have real-time access to our key metrics?
• Are we making decisions quickly enough to seize opportunities?
• Are we intentionally spending time on what drives the business forward?

If you’re not seeing growth, it’s time to be intentional about the constraints holding your company back. The businesses that see higher growth are the ones that create proper growth strategies, increase their digital maturity, gain real-time visibility to key metrics, make timely decisions, and move forward with intent. What’s your next move?  

About the Author
Jeff Andrews is the founder and principal of Red Dog Advisors, a growth advisory firm with a strong focus on ERP and CRM solutions. He’s held leadership roles and led growth at companies of all sizes, including Fidelity Investments, Paycor and Velosio. Andrews can be reached at jeff@reddogadvisors.com. Learn more at reddogadvisors.com.