100 indicators that your business is in trouble

1. You treat your business as a hobby.
2. Your scale-up business plan has not gone through sensitivity analysis.
3. You didn’t take into account all aspects and inter-dependencies of scaled-up business and face several bottlenecks.
4. You track and measure KPIs you cannot improve.
5. You do not measure the attitude of your customers to your product.
6. You collect feedback from your customers but do not use it in practice.
7. You do not have recurrent business planning and budgeting process in place.
8. Your core team taking over new responsibilities without getting proper expertise and skills.
9. You do not have a simple and clear strategic plan that you can easily communicate with your entire team.
10. You do not have a proven team meetings rhythm to provide updates and discuss tactical issues.
11. You promote your key employees to the managerial roles without providing them with relevant training and tests.
12. The management team is blaming each other for failures.
13. You did not put enough pressure on the management team to deliver what was planned.
14. Your team is all tech people, but not business people.
15. You have a lack of internal challenging culture: your designer, engineer and go-getter is the same person.
16. You do not admit that your core team are great and talented people, but they lack the skills and experience needed for the business.
17. You as a founder continue to handle and control all functional areas.
18. You do not delegate operational decision-making while scaling-up.
19. You are trying to do both strategic planning and execution without hiring professional heads of functions to be responsible for implementation.
20. You continue to set tasks to all managers in all functions.
21. You spend time doing things which do not move the needle.
22. You do not set SMART goals.
23. You do not have the set of internal metrics to track where you are heading.
24. You have many metrics, but you do not clearly understand the story or route-cause behind them.
25. You do not have a dashboard to track your KPIs in a pace you need.
26. You do not have simple Early-warning system that alarms you in time.
27. You produce your product first and think about how to market it afterwards.
28. You do not have a formalized sales process in place.
29. You do not have sales and churn playbooks.
30. You do not have a long-term Big Hairy Audacious Goal which helps you to set mid-term goals and make quick but smart decisions.

31. You did not plan that your scale-up costs jump substantially ahead of revenue growth. 

32. You cannot correctly evaluate and plan your costs for the scale-up phase. 

33. You do not know if your marketing mix is relevant for your product and/or target. 

34. Your customers are dropping the use of your product and you do not even know why. 

35. You have neither built nor implemented business processes, which fit the new size of operations. 

36. You are hiring more people to cope with demand without changing your business processes. 

37. You do not have formalized processes and procedures for customer-facing personnel. 

38. You do not have the training and development process for your team. 

39. You hire people based on your attitude and sympathy rather than matching their profiles to future business needs. 

40. You do not have SMART goals and targets for each team member. 

41. You are hiring people without a deep understanding of the profile you need and allowing mismatch because of fast-growth phase rush. 

42. You did not design your scaled-up organization structure and do “problem pop-up” hiring. 

43. You mangers hire weak subordinates, as they are afraid of the competition. 

44. You continue trying to add new features or add-ons during scale-up even if your product-market match is achieved. 

45. You are saying Yes to every customer request and not standardizing your product. 

46. You are not pivoting away quick enough from the bad product and trying to continue to improve them. 

47. You do not know the real Lifetime Value of your customer. 

48. You do not know your real Customer Acquisition cost. 

49. Your Commercial team does not have clear, well-measured and manageable KPIs and ROI. 

50. You are using only a few communication channels without building an efficient mix. 

51. You do not build a customer-focused approach as one of the company cornerstones before going scale-up. 

52. You do not know if your sales channels and locations are right for your customers. 

53. Your sales team KPIs are not related to Customer Lifetime Value. 

54. Customer acquisition cost is higher than the customer Lifetime Value. 

55. You do not revise or adjust your business model when the environment changes. 

56. You have the wrong partnerships and deny the right ones. 

57. You procurement decisions are based on “I know them” rather than open competition 

58. Your IT infrastructure is not scalable.
59. You go into new markets before maximizing your existing market.
60. You did not clearly define who your customers are.
61. Your conclusion about global demand is based on local trends and clients’ behaviour.
62. Your product does not have the market on a scale you assumed.
63. After introducing your product to a new market, you found that the substitute product already exists and it’s successful.
64. You did not do a market study before entering the new market.
65. You have wrongly defined your market segment.
66. You have overestimated the market capacity and demand for your product.
67. To be successful your product requires robust capabilities of other product that is not a mass-market yet.
68. You did not notice that your competitors made a better product or communicated it more efficiently.
69. You do not know your market share.
70. You did not define your competitors or substitute product.
71. You do not have a continuous market analysis process in place.
72. You do not do a regular SWOT analysis.
73. You postpone hiring despite the growing demand and overload of your core employees.
74. There is no alignment between sales and marketing.
75. Your core team consists of tech people, but not business people.
76. You do not hire key people with high skills because they are too expensive.
77. You continue focusing on new products development without making yourself the best in the product you have and currently sell.
78. Your product is complex, and you can’t explain it simply.
79. Your product is too local and does not fit other markets.
80. The value proposition of your product is not strong enough to become a mass scale.
81. You did not involve your customers in the product development process.
82. The key feature of your product is not scalable or slow scalable.
83. You lose some key features of your product when scaling-up.
84. Your product is solving the problem that not too many people have.
85. Your product is something nice to have, but not necessary.
86. Your product does not have a simple and clear differentiation against competitors.
87. You do not think you need to market your product, or you just postpone marketing it for later.
88. You do not have professional marketing head in your executive team.

89. You can’t pay your marketing and sales bills in the middle of an expansion.
90. You have not set-up your credit-control and collection process properly.
91. You are not focusing on leadership, funding the business and key stakeholder relationship management.
92. You started your investment attraction campaign too late and have not got enough funding by the time your product should go to market.
93. You as a CEO and founder are not taking personal responsibility for funding scale-up process.
94. You have created a demand and expectations but can’t deliver the product.
95. You did not plan the roadmap for funding with clear milestones.
96. You did not achieve the next milestone in operations or sales volume you planned before you run out of cash.
97. Your investors do not understand why people will need your product
98. You do not recognize your mistakes and do not learn from them.
99. You haven’t invested in redundancy or PAYG on time and forced to purchase at high rates.

100. Your customers delay payments because of macroeconomics problems