There is nothing more frustrating in business than to work 80 hour weeks and make little or no money. For the new business owner, thoughts of “why did I ever give up my old job and take all of this risk?” begin to pass through your mind. And what about all of the challenges of having employees? But it is too late to turn back now. This is when you should turn to a consultant.
Committing to your business and putting in the time is not only admirable, it is one of the keys to success. You truly do get out what you put in. The question is, “is your organization getting to full benefit of your time?” One area that often gets less than the optimal commitment is in training. In smaller companies, and in particular the service industry, training is an often neglected commodity. Let’s say you are a plumber and have opened your own plumbing company. Sure you have trained your journeyman plumbers to do the basic tasks, but you reserve the more challenging work for yourself out of fear the “new guys” might fowl it up. You also handle all of the scheduling for the daily work load; taking all of the sales calls after they are first taken by your reception staff. You are proud of yourself because you have used the latest wireless technology to get these sales calls to you, and you have wireless capacity for remote scheduling. Your wife mentions to you that you have worked past 10:00 PM just about every night this month. Since she does the books, she also mentions that overtime is way up and cutting into the profit. It seems that as your company’s good reputation spreads, the amount of more complicated work that your competitors are weak in, is now coming your way. Since you do this work, you travel all over the county to get it done. You take at least one journeyman on each of these jobs, resulting in the overtime. What should you do? You would like to train other members of your team to do this work, but you just don’t have the time.
This is a classic case of growing pains, and can happen to businesses big and small, old and new. Early preemptive training of the journeyman plumbers as well as training the reception staff to handle dispatching would have stopped this problem before it even happened.
Often the Boss doesn’t want to give up this much control. His or her name is on the line and he or she doesn’t want someone else to screw things up. Every owner and senior manager of every company should train thier staff so that they can be away from the office for a month and operations would continue smoothly in their absence. But succession in a team and in a company is another subject on its own.
In many instances, the owner is the top producer. This being said, owners are managers. The definition of management is quite simply getting things accomplished through the effort of others. As much as possible, owners should spend their time coaching, mentoring and managing team members. In larger companies, owners spend time managing senior managers. In smaller companies, the owner may interface daily with the entire team.
Anytime your company’s profitability is suffering, a financial review is called for. Revenue and expenses should be compared to previous periods and to peer groups. Any areas where there are gaps should be investigated thoroughly. Every owner/manager of a company should invest time in regular analysis of the company or department, to look for any low hanging fruit; those things that can produce the most immediate and meaningful improvement to the operation. Once this analysis is satisfactorily completed, a plan and forecast should be developed and monitored.
This just scratches the surface, but business owners and managers should make sure the company is leveraging their time in the most efficient and productive way possible. Remember, the speed of the leader determines the speed of the pack. Use your time wisely and you staff will as well.
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