My client, the new Managing Director of a specialist PR firm, had sent me some documentation in advance of a strategy workshop I was running for them.  Unfortunately, it seemed as if one of the files was corrupted; when I printed off the organisation chart the boxes with job titles were there, but the connecting reporting lines were missing. I mentioned this to the MD in our brief meeting before the workshop and asked him if perhaps someone could print me a copy complete with lines. He seemed surprised. “Oh, we don’t have reporting lines. We think that would make us inflexible and unresponsive to customer requests.” One of the issues that emerged in the workshop was that staff below the Board lacked innovation and never took responsibility or made decisions for themselves. I suggested that clearly defined accountability, authority and reporting lines meant staff could innovate and take responsibility within the areas that belonged to them. Conversely, they were unlikely to take own...

Is low productivity built-in to UK small businesses? One benefit claimed for Brexit was forcing UK business to address its woeful productivity.  Particularly in the SME sector our productivity is far worse than that of our competitors and there is a school of thought that says ready access to cheap labour contributed to this (although opinions vary of course – these are economists. In particular, countries such as France and Germany have had the same access to labour without it depressing their productivity in the same way). Be that as it may, many UK businesses have faced labour shortages and wage increases.  The news bulletins run interviews with under-pressure business owners, most of them saying: I cannot get the staff so I am limiting capacity and turnover I have had to raise wages to get or keep people and I can’t pass that on in prices I am paying higher wages but that doesn’t translate into more productivity The gist of these opinions (from albeit a tiny and edited sam...

Growing a sales team is a challenge that every business must overcome if it is to become scalable.  Success means hiring into a proven process and managing performance. I analysed the sales process of two of my clients - both are growing fast. I thought it would be useful to try to learn from any similarities in their approach. They are in entirely different sectors – one selling software (transactional up to complex solutions sales) and the other a builders’ merchant (almost entirely transactional sales). Both sectors are highly competitive, which makes their performance even more impressive. The things they have in common are: They are both run by people who did not found the business. One was brought in to take over as MD and the other progressed internally from a junior sales role. They both use internal telesales teams supported by field sales as their primary sales method. They both include a mix of account and new business sales in everyone’s target. The account element has ...

To paraphrase the famous US election slogan "It's about the economy, stupid.", research (1,2) has yet again shown that the most important factor in business performance is the quality of management. Not how much the company spends on technology. Not how much digital marketing they do. Not even how much is spent on R&D. Just how well the business is managed. Really simple, doable stuff.  A clear purpose.  A usable orgchart.  Useful job descriptions.  Repeatable written processes.  Measurement and regular review. None of these are difficult to do, although implementation does take time, determinationa and resilience on the part of the owner and there are some basic techniques to learn. If you would like to learn how to apply better management techniques to your business then take a look at this website . 1) What Drives Differences in Management Practices? Nicholas A. BloomErik BrynjolfssonLucia FosterRon JarminMegha PatnaikItay Saporta-EkstenJohn Van Reenen, A...

Sometimes business owners decry “the politics” they see as being inherent in bigger businesses. The implication is clear: smaller businesses are free of that kind of skullduggery and self-seeking. The fact is that many business owners get stuck because they don’t understand that, past a certain size, they need to include political thinking in their growth plans. Most owner-managed businesses get stuck once they have grown to between 5 and 25 employees. They reach the limit of what the owner can manage on his or her own. There are only so many employees, customers, sales and transactions that one person can deal with. You could hink of it as reaching your plate-spinning capacity. Unfortunately, most businesses (over 99.5% according to the ONS) get stuck like this – even when the market opportunity for more growth is there. They reach this revenue ceiling and there they stay. It doesn’t matter what the owner does, how many hours they work, what fancy marketing they invest in. They have g...

One of my clients was sceptical about the quality of his managers. Like many business owners who have become the bottleneck in their business he was desperate to get out from under all the things that, apparently, only he could do and the decisions that, apparently, only he could make.  He didn’t see his managers as part of the solution but as part of the problem so he hired me originally with the idea of finding some “big hitter” from a larger business who would help him achieve his ambitious growth targets. I asked him how he knew that his managers weren’t up to the task.  As is usual in these cases the answer was a series of anecdotes about failures to do x or inability to understand the importance of y or how they didn't take the success of the business seriously.  A little probing however showed that he had never really explained to them where the business was going, what their role in this was and what success in the role looked like. Every time someone came to him ...

As a business owner trying to systemise and scale your business, what have you tried that hasn't worked? Many business owners believe that the stress, frustration and limited growth they experience is just the way it is – it comes with the territory. They don’t know what they don’t know and so don’t think about changing things. Others, perhaps more enlightened or more unhappy with their working life and business performance, try to change things when they come across something that looks like a solution. Here are the most common: Vision-building sessions with staff. Often these result in a mission statement or pictures on the wall of people rock-climbing and so forth. These efforts lose momentum quickly as staff engagement and belief are low to zero from the outset; they have little say in the vision, little impact on the outcome and little stake in its achievement. HR initiatives. Implementing job descriptions, appraisals, team meetings – maybe even Investors in People. After the ...

 Some months back I was contacted by a previous client. He was feeling stuck again and thinking about getting some more coaching. Thanks to his drive and ability his business has grown by about 500% since we last worked together three years ago. He has overcome the barrier of just expecting employees to know what to do, and has sorted out his back office structure, processes and systems so he can delegate, let go and focus on growth. So why more coaching? It seems as if his operational stuff is performing inconsistently and lacks visibility compared with his improved back-office. One of his long-time employees is leaving. He is slipping back into thinking that systems solve problems rather than leadership solving them. He lacks confidence in approaching this problem and can’t see a clear plan or way forward. We talked for an hour or so about this. I felt slightly uninspiring as we went over the same ground: Clear accountability, unambiguous targets, simple written processes, routin...

Successful delegation requires the right culture. If your staff are overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, feeling unloved and underpaid, resentful towards management (that is, towards you)…don’t try to delegate stuff to them. If that is the situation in your business then chances are that you too are feeling overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, unloved and underpaid…and resentful towards your staff. This is a recipe for a downward spiral. How then to break out of this situation?  And break out of it you must, or things will just get worse and health, wealth and happiness will become a distant memory. The fundamental basis for successful delegation is trust.  You must trust your staff to be willing and able to do the right thing for the business - and in order for this to be true they must trust you to be willing and able to do the right thing by them. If you feel there is a lack of trust between you and you can see that delegati...

Some of my business owner clients look shifty when leadership comes up in the conversation.  They don’t see themselves as leaders – even though they are. I explain that leadership doesn’t mean they have to suddenly become Napoleon or Gandhi, but it might help them to understand what leadership looks like and do the things that leadership requires.  The quality of the leadership will to a large extent decide the success of a business. Google returns over 244 million pages when you search for “leadership books”.  Amazon returns over 60,000 titles.  The subject has been fascinating people for thousands of years.  We all know it when we see it, and recognise when it is absent, but a practical, implementable definition remains elusive. The development of leadership thinking and research over the last few decades can be summarised as: First, people started by examining leadership traits Leaders were born Certain traits recurred, like intelligence, empathy, confidence ...

Often when talking to clients about delegation they work around to telling me that one barrier is “I don’t trust my employees”.  My normal response is to ask “Do you think they trust you?”  We generally then get to the point that my client isn’t accusing her staff of stealing her sandwiches from the kitchen fridge, or selling company secrets online – it’s just that they don’t think they care enough or understand enough to be trusted with more responsibility. If your staff are overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, feeling unloved and underpaid, resentful towards management (that is, towards you)…don’t try to delegate stuff to them. If that is the situation in your business then chances are that you too are feeling overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, unloved and underpaid…and resentful towards your staff. This is a recipe for a downward spiral. How then to break out of this situation?  And break out of it you must, or things...

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 ...

A while ago, one of my clients was approached by an old colleague who now sells software. Specifically, BI or business intelligence software. It seems to be one of a raft of products aimed at SMEs and purported to help owners make sense of data. The salespeople (or avatars) usually refer to this as “big data”, whether it is or not. They do this while demonstrating lots of brightly-coloured graphs, each of which can be rotated, sliced and diced, drilled into, overlaid, reformatted…a salesperson’s dream. The business owner watches with glazed eyes – here, surely, is a cure to all those productivity problems and quality problems and control problems. It is of course much simpler nowadays to find, extract, link and manipulate data from an organisations’s computer systems. Most cloud-based systems will have an application programming interface (API) that allows data to be extracted. Even clunky old systems like Sage (still used by many small businesses) have this sort of facility. However, ...

Your omputer systems should do two things:  1) help you get the job done and 2) provide useful management information that underpins decisions. For instance, in a project tracking system, recording the status of each project and the date that it changed can create a simple traffic-light system that shows at a glance where things are going awry. Extrapolating from the specific to the general: All businesses can be thought of as a series of flows and balances (or pipes and buckets if you prefer). Management information tracks the speed of these flows, the volume of flow and the level in the buckets.  Examples of flow volume are number of new enquiries per day, value of invoices issued per month or, in my client’s case, projects completed per week.  Examples of flow speed are average project duration, sales lead-time or quote turnaround time.  Examples of levels are debtors, or quote bank, or cash in the bank. Every part of your business can be thought of in this way....

Business owners tend to look shifty when leadership comes up in the conversation.  They don’t see themselves as leaders – even though they are. Leadership doesn’t mean they have to suddenly become Napoleon or Gandhi, but it might help them to understand what leadership looks like and do the things that leadership requires.  The quality of the leadership will to a large extent decide the scalability of a business. Google returns over 244 million pages when you search for “leadership books”.  Amazon returns over 60,000 titles.  The subject has been fascinating people for thousands of years.  We all know it when we see it, and recognise when it is absent, but a practical, implementable definition remains elusive. The development of leadership thinking and research over the last few decades can be summarised as: First, people started by examining leadership traits Leaders were born Certain traits recurred, like intelligence, empathy, confidence However, the traits u...

 Goering allegedly once said  “When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver” . I’m a bit like that.  When business owners talk about culture, I know that I’m in for a platitude-strewn conversation.  I’d put a small bet on the words “customer-focused” appearing within the next few sentences. Too many business owners seem to see “culture” as something to be implemented, like a new accounts package.  They see it as a some kind of mantra, developed in a couple of faintly embarrassing employee workshops facilitated by some bloke in a suit, or perhaps beard, sandals and pullover, and trotted out whenever the need arises. So…tick…done the culture.  Got the pictures on the wall (cue stirring slogan and glossy image of man climbing mountain, or the Red Arrows).  What’s next on the list? In fact, culture is what it feels like to be an employee, and by extension, what it feels like to be a customer, of your organisation. What  do  you think it f...

Do you think your business could be more productive?  How important to you is improving the productivity of your business?  When did you last take action to significantly improve productivity?  When did you last measure the productivity of your business? I'm guessing the answer to most of these questions is "Errrr..." If the average UK SME achieved the average productivity of larger UK businesses then it would double its output per head. Double. Its. Output. Per. Head. What do you think doubling turnover without hiring any more people would do to your profitability? Wouldn't you like to be able to grow your business without having to fight to find new employees and, if you can find any, paying them inflation-busting salaries? Perhaps after all you should pay a little more attention to the productivity of your business. To help you, here is an ebook that explains how business owners can improve the productivity of their business.

Delegation is the single most important skill for a business owner to master (discuss). That makes it depressing that so many business owners are pants at it.  Here are some excuses and reasons I’ve been given with my responses – feel free to add your own: My employees will make mistakes.   Of course they will.  That’s how you learned.  Support them so that they don’t make big mistakes I do not have the right staff, they are not up to it.   From experience I suggest that this may be the case, but probably isn’t.  Employees’ performance usually reflects their manager’s capability.  Leaders understand that people live up to (or down to) their leader’s expectations. It is quicker to do it myself.   Well, it might take you an hour to show someone else what takes you five minutes – but if you don’t invest that hour you will still be doing it yourself in one year or ten years It’s cheaper to do it myself.   This is clearly nonse...

How well do you run your business? Research by HBR 1 shows that many managers (and by extension, business owners) are unable to judge objectively how well or poorly their business is run. In fact, the research found zero correlation between self-perceived management quality and actual performance. The same report finds that only 6% of businesses are well run, and that the difference between them and the worst-run businesses equates to 25% in growth rate and 75% in productivity. Of course, you are probably one of the 6% - aren't you? Just think about those figures. Take a modest business (say £1m turnover, 10% net margin, 5% annual growth) and assume the owner is in the middle of the pack (12.5% potential improvement in growth, 37.5% potential improvement in productivity). Over 5 years, the gap is over £200k of net profit. £40k per year. Just for getting the basics right. No fancy strategy or miraculous new product required. Curiously, the same skewed perceptio...