Make business work – by system and staff
by Kelly Schwedland
If you really want to make your business work, then change the work you do!
Going to work "on" your business, rather than "in" your business, is the secret to creating a business that truly works. How many times have you seen or heard something like this:
"Local business closes doors for the last time. Exhausted from years of long hours at low pay, business owner calls it quits."
Unfortunately, I remember a time that it was not just another statistic; it depicted my family’s situation. A company my parents started with the family savings. The company that my brothers and I had worked in since I could hardly remember. Now it would be gone.
It didn’t seem right. Surely, there was something my parents didn’t know. Surely, there had to be a way to truly make this business work — Those were my thoughts on that New Years Day my senior year in High School, as we helped my dad pack up what remained of the business, and move it to storage.
The asking of the question was the beginning of a search, a quest almost, to find the answer. How to build a growing business that works, and gives the owners more life, rather than draining the life out of them?
Years later, after business school, countless books, tapes and seminars, after a variety of start up companies, an Indiana growth 100 company and even an INC-500 firm, the answer came. It came as if a light bulb was turned on. It took all the problems I had seen, in every business and put them in perspective. Nearly every small business owner I had met was focused on doing the wrong work. Stricken by an entrepreneurial seizure, they thought that if they knew how to do the technical work of the business, they could build a business that did that technical work. This was the problem.
An independent system
Successful business owners, true entrepreneurs, go to work, "on" the business, finding a way to get the work done, rather than just "in" the business doing the work.
Yet, every time I tell this to a small business owner the immediate reaction is to say "Yeah, but I cannot afford to hire anyone else to help me do the work." I have to say, "You are missing the point."
What every business owner who has successfully grown to multiple locations knows is that they started by building a business that worked completely independent of themselves. Literally, they created an integrated process for recreating the same product or service consistently. Every bit of the operation was documented, the words that are used, the way they are said, the procedures for opening and for closing, the very special way everything is prepared for the perfect experience every time, and most importantly the attitude embodied by the employees. All of this, to give each patron the perfect place to enjoy life. And there are no excuses because each cheerful member of the staff has been shown all the procedures that each is responsible for. And, as things come up, (as they always do in business) that no one expected, new procedures are added for each item until the whole thing runs like a Swiss watch.
Key questions
So begin by asking yourself the following questions:
- What would happen if, tomorrow you could not do the work? How would it get done?
- Have you documented how your business works so that anyone could do it?
- What are the systems you have created that others could use to duplicate your results?
- What is your proprietary way of doing business?
- How could you pass that along to someone else, if you were not there?
Realistically, if you do not have answers to these questions, regardless of how complex you think your business is, you do not have a business, all you have is a job. And, worse yet, you are working for a lunatic — yourself.
When you can begin to see the business as apart from yourself, rather than a part of yourself, you are on your way to creating a business that really works.
Kelly Schwedland is president of American Business Dynamics, a small business consulting firm focused on issues related to growing companies.