Have you been a successful business owner for years – so you know what works! No matter how long you have been in business there are always new techniques to try that can improve productivity. We all know the saying “If it aint broke don’t fix it” but what about fine tuning and adding more? This is a great article it gives ways to keep business owners from becoming stagnate. Hope it works for your business the way it helped mine!

There is a plethora of advice available for new business owners. But it’s wrong to assume that the hard work diminishes once entrepreneurs have established their ventures. It’s just that over time, creativity and innovation can subside: When mature companies fail, it is often because they haven’t adapted, particularly during an economic downturn. In this Smart Answers column, three longtime business consultants lay out six major pitfalls that lie in wait for established businesses—and they illustrate how owners can overcome them.

1.    Complacency. Once a company grows to the point where it owns its product or service niche, it’s all-too-easy to stagnate by following conventional wisdom and obsolete business practices. For instance, a 69-year-old professional service provider recently asked when social media would "just go away," says Mark Stevens, chief executive officer of MSCO, a Rye Brook, N.Y., management-consulting firm and author of Your Company Sucks: It’s Time to Declare War on Yourself (BenBella Books, August 2011). "Worst of all, a company may have a certain way of doing things that it clings to, even when all the evidence says it isn’t working the way it used to," he says. Even a mature company must maintain a startup mentality, invest in innovation, and raise the bar for its products and services. If that doesn’t happen, Stevens says, it can face a long and painful slide into obscurity.

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