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.