Working On Your Busines - Rather than In It
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Last week I went to a free seminar put on by the local Business Link.
Quick tangent: in my city there is an excellent resource for entrepreneurs called the business link…probably deserves its own post, but you may want to be on the lookout for small business support from you municipal or state/provincial government. Micro business has a huge impact on the economy and government is beginning to recognize that impact in the form of powerful support tools for small business.
The talk was called “How To Work ON Your Business, Rather Than IN Your Business.” Now as someone who practically sleeps with Michael Gerber’s, The E-Myth Revisited under my pillow I was very familiar with the concepts presented in the talk. Even though I have read the book numerous times, getting lost in “technician” tasks remains my number one challenge in my business.
Definition of A Successful Business
I liked the presenter’s definition of a successful business:
- has predictable profits
- doesn’t require the owner to be present
My personal definition left out #1, but of course it is a very good one as it touches on all kinds of management and budgeting issues that are essential for a great business.
We heard about all the activities that the owner of a successful business should not be doing and why…all stuff that can be found in the E-Myth.
But there was a couple take-aways that I’d like to share that made the seminar very worthwhile for me.
Systems
A manager creates and manages systems, not people. A manager always needs to keep this in mind. Any problem in a business needs to blamed on a system, not on a person.
The manager must spend their time improving systems, not dealing with individual problems.
Expertise
When you are looking to get technician tasks off of your plate, think in terms of hiring expertise rather than hiring a person.
This is one that has caught me recently. I have struggled to find a “clone” of myself to help me with my blog network, but really I should be defining a roll that requires a specific expertise and then someone with that skill set to fill the roll and perform the task.
Building a Business is Like a See-Saw
There is a strategic business activities on one side and technician activities on the other end. In my business, I’m sitting on the ground, playing see-saw with only a few grams of weight on the other side of the board…I’m on the technician side…natch.
So the goal isn’t to look for and try to hire a perfect clone of myself to sit on the other side and take all the technical tasks off of my plate. The goal is to gradually identify and then find someone to take responsibility for, the tasks which have the greatest return on an outsourcing investment.
The speaker suggested that I identify tasks and categorize them in a couple ways:
- how much pain they cause - for me I hate bookkeeping, so it is completely worth it for me to pay someone else to take that headache away.
- the direct effect on the bottom line - if a task costs x dollars but brings in xx dollars then it is an obvious one to outsource.
For my blog network the break even point is probably around 30 sites. With the pilot project well underway with 4 sites, it isn’t that tough for me to see all the things that I will need to get off of my plate if I’m going to manage a network of 30 sites.
It is one of the advantages of thinking big…you can’t fool yourself into believing that one person can do everything. To be honest it has been overwhelming at points, even with 4 blogs.
Like a good see-saw game there needs to be a balance between the two business forces of production and strategy. It often feels like production is the most important because it seems like that’s where the money comes from, but if you look as successful businesses, it’s the strategy that has made them great.
Related Reading
- The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by Renée Mauborgne & W. Chan Kim
- Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
Jon Symons
Playing see-saw in my business…so you don’t have to.