Building a business is a choice that business owners make every day.  Some invest time in the long-term and create repeatable processes and accountable employees.  Others remain chained to the wheel of circumstance. I was talking recently to a client about delegation and helping staff take more responsibility. Like many owners, she has become something of a bottleneck in her business, with most decisions and some critical activities reliant upon her. I explained how implementing things like organisation charts, job descriptions, processes and objectives helps to empower employees, by making their responsibilities and authority clear. Her immediate reaction was “I can get our HR consultant to do that.” I commended this piece of delegation but had to point out that, while an HR consultant was exactly the right person to create the templates, advise on best practice and record and publish the results, the actual discussions with employees were far too important to be left to a th...

Whilst preparing a client proposal recently I referenced an HBR paper on the stages of business growth (The Five Stages of Small Business Growth by Neil C. Churchill and Virginia L. Lewis  link ). It’s rather old but remains, like all good management models, relevant today. It provides a useful tool for gaining insight into an individual business, its stage of development, strategy and challenges. It also remains somewhat inaccessible to the owners of small businesses, who might see it as theoretical or even corporate. Their small businesses are not big enough to afford the shamens required to think about and apply these frameworks. From the practical, over-worked perspective of a business owner, the theories don’t look like their business. They must be talking about someone else. That led me to wondering about what a model that they would find useful might look like. I came up with a three-stage model: Stage 1: The business owner controls and does everything Stage 2: The business ...