Nibletz Staff
There comes a time in every business owner’s life where they have to graduate. They have to make a fundamental change to how they spend their day-to-day. It can be truly difficult and it’s where a lot of go-getting, energetic, and enterprising individuals will have trouble. But if your business is to continue succeeding, it is necessary. It’s the step of moving from working in the business less and working on the business more. Taking yourself out of the front line to sit back and plan the whole offensive. A lot of people know they need to do that but aren’t exactly sure what it means. Here are a few places your priority needs to shift to.
The path ahead
The time to start working on the business, not in it, is around about the time you start really getting into the rhythm of the business. You’re making good profits and you’ve got a respectable chunk of the marketplace. But good-as-usual soon becomes not-good-enough in business. If your business is at risk of stagnating, your first concern should be finding the path ahead and exactly how you’re going to grow your business. It might mean looking at a new market, diversifying your products, opening a second location, even acquiring another business to take under the umbrella. Even if you’re not quite at the stage to action that growth yet, you need to choose your path.
Plan, plan, and plan again
Most owners probably wouldn’t say that creating a business plan is their favorite part of their job. But when you complete the initial business, it’s crucial to get back into it again. If you have one of the goals mentioned in the past point in mind, then you need to know what steps you need to take to scale the business to make it ready for them. Even if you don’t, it’s important that the business has goals and it has steps it can take to fulfill them. Otherwise, you, the team, and the outfit as a whole will lose focus.
Share the load
But, how do you get to the point where you can scale back your focus and slot into a more bird’s’ eye view of the business? You already have plenty of responsibilities. Obviously, you have to start giving them up. You need an exit strategy, as far as running every detail of the business goes. Learning to delegate is crucial. But you should also be looking for the potential leaders in the business, or consider hiring them from outside. You need to develop a core team of managers if you don’t have them already. While you’re working outside the business, team meetings with this core can help you keep your finger on the pulse of the team.
Lighten the load, too
Naturally, you can’t just shift more of your responsibilities downwind and just hope that the team there is prepared to deal with all of it. When you’re dealing with the day-to-day processes of the business, it’s sometimes hard to imagine there’s a better way of doing it wall. When you catch your breath and step away from it, the solutions might be right there in front of your eyes. For one, automation is becoming a more and more reliable tool in business. Functions like accounting, HR, even marketing can be automated. Not only does it mean the team can get more productive, it also reduces the burden of some of the team’s more repetitive task. What can’t be automated can probably still be done better. Looking for new tools for process and new methods allows you to systemize them.
Pulling the strings
Adding and subtracting to the workload of the team isn’t all it means to be a leader, either. You also need to learn how to manage your team well. This all boils down to, essentially, creating a healthy work environment and a company culture. Caring their safety and wellbeing in the workplace, promoting positive working relationships, creating a legally tight HR policy. These are all elements that go into making sure you have a team that is happy, productive, and a lot easier to retain. Keep your door open, communicate often beyond the meetings with your core management team, and recognize employee success. Dole out the accountancy, but keep the responsibility to yourself.
Build better people
You want to manage your team well so that they’re more productive and less likely to quit. But creating a positive workplace culture isn’t the only way to do that. If you want employees to care about the business’s future, you have to care about theirs. Invest in them and make sure that they have a place in the business for some time to come. Finding opportunities for internal promotion is the easiest way to guarantee that more people stick around and work towards bettering themselves and providing better results. But when you can’t do that, focus on the mobility you can help them achieve otherwise. Create a practice of employee development plans, finding the opportunities for training and delegation. Work on their experience internally and externally.
Mind on my money and my money on my mind
The past few points have focused largely on the employees and for good reason. They are the most valuable resource the business has. But they’re not the only one. Money is the blood, pumping through the whole body of the company. Without someone to really give it the attention it deserves, you have no idea how healthy it really is. Creating cash flow projections, tracking incoming and outgoing, creating cost-cutting plans. These are all ways to better know what your finances are doing and how they can better do. At some point, you might want to consider assigning an accountant to the job as it can be easy to get lost in it to the extent that you don’t have time for your other duties. But getting some grasp of your finances is important.
Be the face of the business
Working on the business isn’t all about creating a machine that works well internally, either. There’s also the exterior to be concerned about. As the business owner, you should be the face of the business. There are no others qualified to do the kind of networking that you can do. The reason business owners network is to find new partnership opportunities, exciting new talent, and places to spread the brand. Trade shows, networking groups, talks, press relation chances. You are the one who needs to be in the spotlight on behalf of the team.
Think outside the game
Reaching outside the business shouldn’t be done to find new people and opportunities to make the best use of. It should also be done to get connected with your target market. It’s too easy to start making assumptions once you’ve been running successfully for a while. But once you start assuming you know who your customer is and what they want, that’s when you risk creating a rear barrier between you and them. Take the opportunity to think like a customer. Re-examine your branding, your price points, your strategy by blind-testing the business with people in the right demographic. Keep up with the market research and never stop evolving to make the business as relevant as it can be.
Find the evidence that matters
Internally and externally, making decisions that unlock further progress is what matters. But how do you know whether you’re actually making progress or not? You need to define the factors of success in the business. Individual managers, teams, and employees will all have their own metrics for success. But they don’t always give the most comprehensive picture of how the business is doing. You need to set key performance indicators for the business. This can include big picture numbers like your rate of customer retention, your rate of employee churn, and the cost it takes to convert a lead. Make use of your team to capture the data that feeds into these KPIs, and give them their own to help them work better. KPIs can track individual productivity, for instance, helping everyone stay honest and helping you solve problems like distraction or poor work methods.
Relax
When they’re on the way up from the bottom, the driven business owner tends to climb and climb without taking a breath. Fighting to make a success of the business can be tiring, so taking a back seat can give you the opportunity to find the work-life balance that’s been missing. There are reasons to justify not doing so, like wanting to keep your momentum or even believing that a little stress helps you work better. None of those justifications are worth the very real risk that going “all-in” can quickly strip away the love and passion that got you into the business. You want to be just as enthusiastic about your own business five years down the line as you are at the start. Don’t let ambition spoil that for you.
While it’s important that how you spend your time changes, it’s just as vital that you never forget what it’s like to work in the trenches of the everyday. Forget what it’s like to be in the shoes of your employers and you risk alienating yourself from your own business.
