The worst part is when business
owners become three people in one: the Entrepreneur, the Manager,
the Technician. Conflict begins when each one of this personalities wants to
take control.
The Entrepreneur turns any
trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity, motivated by the creative
engine and change. The Manager is pragmatic, a planner, clings to
the status quo, sees problems to solve and roots itself on an idea. The Technician is the
doer, lives in the moment, does one thing at the time. The Entrepreneur gets
into his way with new ideas, which mostly don´t work in the real world,
frustrating him, Manager represents a problem by reducing him to a part of “the
system”, dehumanizing him.
Small Business owners get swamp by all this personalities, trying to
be a whole, an individual, a business. Coming from initial exhilaration to
terror, and from there to exhaustion and finally despair, with a terrible sense
of loss, of purpose and loss of self.
Most common mistake is becoming one single entity, owner and business together. This
might be a good idea at its beginnings, but not viable in a future stage of
business. Usually we tend to think “I´ll do it myself, because no one´s willing
to work as hard as me for my business”, “no one has my ability, judgement or
interest to do it right, so I do it myself” even when having people who are getting
paid to do the job. Worse part of it, is getting into a vicious circle, because
the more “I´ll do it myself”, the less they´ll do when you interfere with their
jobs. But hey! You´re “The Boss”!
At this point you as owner have gone
beyond your Comfort Zone, the boundary within which you feel secure in your
ability to control your environment and start to lose control. Desperately
you abdicate your role of manager and pass accountability to employees, hoping they will bring back
control over the business. Really? Haven´t you thought they have needs of their
own? They know how to be Technicians, so far they need to know why they are
doing what they are doing, what they are accountable for, the standards against
which their work is being evaluated, needing to know where the business is going.
At this point the business can take
3 courses of action; shrinking as its beginnings, broke, or surviving by beating
employees and customers, ranting and raving at your family and friends because you have to be there all the time for it to survive.
If you´ve encountered this
situation or are willing to avoid this reality there´s hope, but most of all
clearness: Your business is not
your life.
WORK ON YOUR BUSINESS NOT IN YOUR BUSINESS.
By creating a model of your
business as a prototype that can be replicated effortlessly as many times as
you wish by following 6 simple rules:
1) Provide consistent value, to customers, employees, suppliers, investors beyond what´s expected.
2) Get Simple. Make your
business be operated by people with the lowest level of skills as possible.
3) Focus in Order to Stand Out.
4) Document all the work done in
Operation Manuals.
5) Provide a Uniformly Service to
the Customer.
6) Seek uniformity in the use of
color, dress and facilities.
BUILD A BUSINESS OF YOUR OWN AS IF YOU WERE BUILDING A PROTOTYPE.
Building a prototype of your
business is a continuous process, we refer to it as the Business Developing
process, founded in three main integrated activities: Innovation, Quantification
and Orchestration.
INNOVATE- THE WAY YOU DO BUSINESS
Innovation has to do more than with
a creative factor with the way a business does Business essentially.
A mechanism for finding and keeping customers in a differentiated manner, where
the business is the product, putting itself in the consumers mind by how it interacts more than what it sells.
Innovation might be slight changes
to your business that don´t require much spending, such as the way you greet or
interact with costumers or the way you dress. Always counting in the customer’s
point of view and always simplifying the operations. Everyone can be involved
in it by asking which would be the best way.
QUANTIFY - ALWAYS
Innovation has to be paired to
quantification, if not it would be a lost effort.
Your business may be lacking the
process of quantification when it comes to innovation and this should be done
at the outset of the Business Developing Process by beginning to quantify
everything related to how you do business, going from how many customers do
arrive in the morning to the afternoon, to how many people call your business
each day, how many of your products are being sold to which days of the week
are the busiest. This is a good way of diagnosing
the health of your
business, to know where you are and where you are going to.
ORCHESTRATE – SAME RESULTS EVERY TIME
When innovating a process and quantifying
the innovation´s results you will be ready to orchestrate your business, this means
eliminating discretion or choice when operating.
You´ll be able to plan and
anticipate by creating order instead of chaos, producing a consistent, predictable results
every single time, no matter what business you are in.
Giving your customer what he/she
wants every single time in your unique way will project the perception you want
for your customers to become loyal to your business.
The Business Development process is
dynamic, looking for the world´s changes and adapting to them. You may call it
differently; Reengineering, TQM, Kaizen or Excellence. Nevertheless a way of
doing something, quantifying it and orchestrating it, will take you necessarily
to improvement.
This will be the step by step
process in which you transform your existing business into a perfectly
organized model for thousands more just like it. Building your prototype.
First of all you have to find
yourself, by deciding who you will be, how you will live, what your
expectations are. Once you come out of your comfort zone, once you decide your PRIMARY AIM, what makes you tick, you
may go on with the next steps:
STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE
This is a clear statement of what
your business will do for you to achieve your Primary Aim. It is the
vision of a finished product. Remember that your business is a vehicle to
enrich your life rather than one that drains your life. It´s a product of your
life plan, as well as your business strategy and plan (they provide the
structure within which your business is intended to operate over time to
fulfill your life Plan).
BUSINESS STRATEGY AND PLAN
Shapes the direction where your
business is going to, how it will get there, specific benchmarks it will need
to hit to be able to work. Also it will be useful for marketing your business
with bankers, investors and alliances in the business community. Designed
for implementation, it is a template for your business, to make certain that
the time you invest in it produces exactly what you want from it.
You´ll have to answer specific questions such as:
How much money is your business going to make
for you? Your vision translated in gross revenues, gross profits, pretax
profits and after tax profits. Answering this questions will serve to your
Primary Aim. How much do you need to live the way you wish, to be independent
of work, to be free. Your business needs to provide you a return of investment.
Is it an opportunity worth pursuing? Does your
business has a realistic chance of achieving those standards? If you assume
that it can it is worth pursuing.
Who´s my customer? You´ll need a Demographic Model, to
answer who would be your most probable customer, defined by age, sex, income,
family status, education, profession. This will help you determine why your
customer buys and who she/he is, how many opportunities you have (your
customers demographics) and how successfully you can satisfy the emotional or
perceived need (your customer psychographics).
ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY
Creating an Organization Chart has
a profound impact on a small company more than any other Business Development
step. It will help to give direction, purpose and style of the business, which
will be balanced, interacting and progressing with each other toward a cohesive
whole marked by the strategic Objective and the Personal Aim on the top.
Organization should be
around accountabilities or responsibilities more than
around personalities. Make sure you look for:
- Defining the Position Contracts.
- Thinking as shareholders with employees, always done
as a corporation more than as a partnership.
- Prototyping the position by replacing yourself with a
System that distinguishes the following from each other:
1. Tactical
work; the one that technicians do.
2. Strategic
work; the one that managers do.
- Working on the system as working in it. Create manuals.
MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Creating a management system will
be your management strategy. This means solving the problems provoked by the unpredictability
of your people, through the process of management development which
will give you marketing results by finding and keeping customers through efficient and effective processes described in operational manuals. It´s important to
have a clear picture by hearing your clients.
PEOPLE STRATEGY
How do I get my people to do what I
want? A question that small business owners continuously ask. The answer: By
creating an environment where “doing it” is more important to your people than non-doing
it, where it becomes a way of life. Creating
a workplace culture is essential to the business. Work is a reflection of who we are inside, it´s
an idea, if positive your business will reflect that optimism, if
negative it will reflect that as well.
By creating a clearly defined
structure of acting in the world, people will work for you not just because it
excites them, but because of this structure through which they can test
themselves and be tested, like in a game. They will
buy into your game on how well you communicate it at the outset of the
relationship. It´s communicated through beliefs on what
your business needs to become -for your customers, for your people, for
yourself- it needs to be more than just a place to go to work.
The hiring process is the medium of communicating the workplace culture, the idea and the beliefs. This first relationship has to be not a dehumanizing
experience, but quite the opposite. Hiring, developing and retaining people
should require a strategy built on an understanding of people completely foreign to most
businesses and the system should be the solution.
By setting a Management System all
managers are expected to produce results and inspire people to commit to the standards
that are set by the business, from and for the business. You want people who want to play your game, not those
who believe they have a better one.
The marketing strategy starts,
ends, lives, and dies with the customer. Keep in mind that what your
customer wants is probably significantly differently from what you think
he wants. Define his needs by looking at who he is -demographics- and
why he buys -psychographics will help-.
Ask your customer. Make a
questionnaire. Ask the colors they prefer, shapes, words, brands of perfume,
food, restaurants, automobiles, clothes, jewelry. Match brands and commercials
that sell them, what messages are being send to them by companies who are
successfully selling to them.
Make a list of those customers who fit your Demographic Model in your geographic perimeter where your customers mainly live or work.
In small businesses you can´t
afford to spend the money big companies do, but you can
afford to spend the time, the thought and the attention on the same
questions they ask.
Source: The E Myth Revisted by Michael E. Gerber.
